• Tensions escalated after anti-government protests in Iran.
• Meeting moved to Oman as Iran demands bilateral talks.
• Iran wants talks to focus only on its nuclear programme.
  

The United States and Iran are due to hold talks in Oman on Friday after Tehran requested a change of venue to limit negotiations to its nuclear programme, a regional official said, with a build-up of US forces in the Middle East raising fears of a confrontation.

Iran wanted the meeting to take place in Oman as a continuation of previous rounds of talks held in the Gulf Arab country on its nuclear programme, asking for a change of location from Turkiye to avoid any expansion of the discussions to issues such as Tehran’s ballistic missiles, the regional official said.

Iran has said it will not make concessions on its formidable ballistic missile programme — one of the biggest in the Middle East — calling that a red line in negotiations.

Tehran, which says it replenished its stockpile of ballistic missiles since coming under attack from Israel last year, has warned that it will unleash its missiles to defend the itself if its security is under threat.

The regional official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iran had since the beginning stressed that it would only discuss its nuclear programme, while Washington wanted other issues on the agenda.

Oil prices extended gains on Wednesday after the US shot down an Iranian drone and armed Iranian boats approached a US-flagged vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, rekindling fears of an escalation between Washington and Tehran.

Iran sought bilateral talks

US President Donald Trump has warned that “bad things” would probably happen if a deal could not be reached, ratcheting up pressure on Iran in a standoff that has led to mutual threats of air strikes and stirred fears of a wider war.

On Tuesday, the US military shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, the US military said, in an incident first reported by Reuters.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “We are negotiating with them right now.” He did not elaborate and declined to say where he expected talks to take place.

A source familiar with the situation said Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was due to take part in the talks, along with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

Ministers from several other countries in the region including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates had also been expected to attend, but a regional source told Reuters that Tehran wanted only bilateral talks with the US.

In June, the United States struck Iranian nuclear targets, joining in at the close of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign.

More recently, the US navy built up forces in the region following protests against the government in Iran, the deadliest since the 1979 revolution.

Trump, who stopped short of carrying out threats to intervene, has since demanded nuclear concessions from Iran, sending a flotilla to its coast.

Iran’s leadership is increasingly worried a US strike could break its grip on power by driving an already enraged public back onto the streets, according to six current and former Iranian officials.

The priority of the diplomatic effort is to avoid conflict and de-escalate tension, a regional official told Reuters earlier.

Tanker incident

Iranian sources told Reuters last week that Trump had demanded three conditions for the resumption of talks: zero enrichment of uranium in Iran, limits on Tehran’s ballistic missile programme and an end to its support for regional proxies.

Iran has long said all three demands are unacceptable infringements of its sovereignty, but two Iranian officials told Reuters its rulers saw the ballistic missile programme, rather than uranium enrichment, as the bigger obstacle.

An Iranian official said there should not be preconditions for talks and that Iran was ready to show flexibility on uranium enrichment, which it says is for peaceful, not military purposes.

Since the US strikes in June, Tehran has said its uranium enrichment work has stopped.

In another incident on Tuesday, this one in the Strait of Hormuz, the US Central Command said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces had approached a US-flagged tanker at speed and threatened to board and seize it.

Maritime risk management group Vanguard said the Iranian boats ordered the tanker to stop its engine and prepare to be boarded. Instead, the tanker sped up and continued its voyage.

• Ryan Routh was arrested in 2024 on Florida golf course.
• Prosecutors say he lay in wait to try to shoot Trump.
• Suspect was convicted after serving as his own lawyer.

Ryan Routh, a man accused of hiding in the bushes of a Florida golf course with a semi-automatic rifle to try to assassinate Donald Trump less than two months before the 2024 US election that returned him to the presidency, is set to be sentenced on Wednesday.

Prosecutors have asked US District Judge Aileen Cannon to sentence Routh to life in prison during the hearing in Fort Pierce, Florida. Routh, 59, was convicted by a jury last September of five criminal counts, including attempted assassination, after serving as his own defence lawyer at trial.

Prosecutors said in a court filing that Routh’s crimes “undeniably warrant a life sentence” because he had plotted the assassination for months, was willing to kill anybody who got in the way and has expressed neither regret nor remorse.

Routh has asked the judge, a Trump appointee, to impose a 27-year term.

In a court filing, Routh denied that he intended to kill Trump, and said he was willing to undergo psychological treatment for a personality disorder in prison. Routh suggested that jurors were misled about the facts of the case by his inability to mount a proper legal defense at trial.

Routh, who at the time of his arrest had resided most recently in Hawaii after previously living in North Carolina, also was convicted of three illegal firearm possession charges and one count of impeding a federal officer during his arrest.

Secret Service agents spotted Routh hiding in bushes a few hundred yards (meters) from where Trump was golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on September 15, 2024. Routh fled the scene and left behind an assault-style rifle but was later arrested.

Second assassination attempt

The incident occurred two months after a bullet fired by a gunman grazed Trump’s ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Both incidents came in the run-up to the November 2024 election in which Trump regained the presidency after having been defeated four years earlier by Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump, a Republican, turned the attempted assassinations into a campaign issue, saying the US Justice Department under Biden could not be trusted with investigations.

Prosecutors said Routh arrived in South Florida about a month before the incident, staying at a truck stop and tracking Trump’s movements and schedule.

Routh carried six cellphones and used fake names to conceal his identity, according to trial evidence, and prosecutors said he lay in wait in thick bushes for nearly 10 hours on the day of the incident. Investigators on the scene found the assault-style rifle, two bags containing body armor-like metal plates and a video camera pointed at the golf course.

Routh pleaded not guilty in the case but fired his lawyers and opted to represent himself at trial despite lacking any formal legal training.

His meandering opening statement touched on topics including the origin of the human species and the settlement of the American West before he was cut off by Cannon, who warned him against making a mockery of the courtroom. Routh’s defence strategy focused on what he described as his nonviolent nature, but he offered little pushback as a parade of law enforcement witnesses detailed the evidence in the case.

Prosecutor John Shipley told jurors that Routh’s plot was “carefully crafted and deadly serious,” adding that without the Secret Service’s intervention “Donald Trump would not be alive.”

After the jury read the verdict, Routh appeared to try to stab himself with a pen several times and had to be restrained by US marshals. His daughter yelled in court that her father had not hurt anyone and that she would get him out of prison.

Trump lauded the verdict in a post on his Truth Social site, writing, “This was an evil man with an evil intention, and they caught him.”

The American broadcasting company CNN has said that US weapons left in Afghanistan are being used for terrorism in Pakistan. According to a CNN report, US weapons have become a major obstacle in counter-terrorism operations. TTP and BLA terrorists are using US-made rifles, machine guns and sniper weapons. The report says that the availability of US weapons has significantly increased the nature and intensity of terrorist attacks. According to SIGAR chief John Sopko, 300,000 US weapons were left in Afghanistan at the time of withdrawal, and modern weapons left by the US in Afghanistan were used during terrorist attacks in South Waziristan and Balochistan.

It should be noted that the Pakistani government has repeatedly provided clear evidence to the Afghan government and the international community that Afghan soil is being used against Pakistan and that TTP militants are using modern weapons left by the US in Afghanistan.