The US and Iran have confirmed they will hold high-level nuclear negotiations this weekend, as Washington continues to pressure Tehran to strike a deal amid escalating regional tensions.

“Iran and the United States will meet in Oman on Saturday for indirect high-level talks,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Tuesday in a social media post.

“It is as much an opportunity as it is a test,” Araghchi wrote on X. “The ball is in America’s court.”

Iran and the United States will meet in Oman on Saturday for indirect high-level talks.

It is as much an opportunity as it is a test. The ball is in America’s court.

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) April 7, 2025

On Monday, US President Donald Trump announced that both countries are trying to negotiate a deal, with talks set to take place in Oman’s capital, Muscat.

“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started,” Trump told reporters while meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. “There’s a major meeting going on between us and Iran that will take place on Saturday, and it will be top level.”

US and Iranian officials have put out contradictory statements about whether the talks will be direct or indirect, the latter of which would involve Omani mediators passing messages between the sides.

“I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

He added, “If it can be done diplomatically in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. … Hopefully, those talks will be successful.”

According to Iranian state media, the negotiations will be led by Araghchi and US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, with Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, serving as a mediator, as the country has long been a channel for communication between the two adversaries.

Tehran has previously said that the country’s missile program would be off limits in any nuclear discussions.

Last week, Trump threatened to bomb Iran and impose secondary tariffs if Tehran does not reach an agreement with Washington to curb its nuclear program.

In response to the White House’s military threats, Iran issued notices to Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Bahrain, warning that any support for a US attack on Iran — including the use of their airspace or territory by American forces — would be considered an act of hostility.

During his first term, Trump withdrew the US from a 2015 nuclear deal — known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — between Iran and several world powers, which had imposed temporary limits on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.

Addressing Washington’s military threats, Araghchi said last week that Iran has always complied with the nuclear deal and never sought to develop nuclear weapons, stressing that military action against the country is not a viable option.

“10 years after signing the JCPOA — and 7 years after the US unilaterally walked away from it — there is not ONE SHRED OF PROOF that Iran has violated this commitment,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X. “Diplomatic engagement worked in the past and can still work. BUT, it should be clear to all that there is — by definition — no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’”

POTUS may not like the 2015 nuclear deal. But it contains one vital commitment by Iran which remains in place, and which even the US—being out of the deal—has benefited from:

“Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear…

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) April 1, 2025

At the White House on Monday, Netanyahu said that the US and Israel are “united in the goal that Iran does not ever get nuclear weapons.”

“If it can be done diplomatically in a full way, the way that it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing,” the Israeli top official said. “But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”

He explained that the Libyan style would involve the US intervening in Iran, overseeing the destruction of Iran’s nuclear installations and the dismantling of equipment. However, Netanyahu also mentioned that military action was discussed as a secondary option if diplomacy fails.

“The second possibility, that will not be, is that they drag out the talks and then there is the military option,” he said in a statement after his meeting with Trump. “Everyone understands this. We spoke about this at length.”

Even though Tehran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has warned that Iran is “dramatically” accelerating uranium enrichment to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level and enough to build six nuclear bombs.

Tehran has repeatedly claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than weapon development.

However, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”

The post US, Iran to Hold Nuclear Talks in Oman on Saturday first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A German court on Tuesday announced the death of 99-year-old Irmgard Furchner, a former Nazi concentration camp secretary.

Furchner is believed to likely be the final person convicted of war crimes committed during the Holocaust. She died on Jan. 14, a fact that came to light this week as the result of an investigation by Der Spiegel.

During World War II, Furchner joined the infamous Nazi SS. At 18, she went to work as a secretary for Lieutenant Colonel Paul Werner Hoppe, the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, where between June 1943 and April 1945 she performed conventional clerical tasks like stenography and transmitting reports to SS headquarters.

In 2022, Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence following her conviction for war crimes — specifically complicity in the murder of more than 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp.

Historians estimate between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners, including 28,000 Jews, died at the camp. Her conviction came as a result of a change in German law which enabled prosecutions of those who assisted in supporting work at concentration camps.

Jurors did not accept Furchner’s defense of ignorance of the atrocities at the camp. “She is guilty even if she just sat in an office and stuck the stamp on my father’s death certificate,” survivor Josef Salomonovic said.

Furchner would ultimately apologize for her role in mass murder. “I am sorry for what happened. I regret having been in Stutthof in those days. I cannot say more,” she said at her trial. A court shot down Furchner’s appeal that she filed in August 2024.

“Furchner’s carefully couched expression of regret minus an admission of guilt is noteworthy mainly for its timing shortly before sentencing. That’s an opportune time to try and gain the sympathy of the judges, and it’s only natural,” Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff, then serving as director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote for the Times of Israel before her sentencing. “Yet Furchner’s refusal to accept any criminal responsibility throughout all the previous proceedings and her feigned ignorance regarding the mass murders tell a different story: no shame, no acceptance of guilt.”

At the time of her conviction, Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said that the prosecution was “not about putting her behind bars for the rest of her life” but instead seeking to hold Furchner responsible to “answer for her actions and acknowledge what happened and what she was involved in.”

Schuster said that “the legal system sent an important message today: Even nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, no line can be drawn under Nazi crimes.”

One survivor of Stutthof who worked as an enslaved laborer in the camp questioned the potency of the message.

“My only disappointment is that a two-year suspended sentence appears to me to be a mistake,” Manfred Goldberg said. “No one in their right mind would send a 97-year-old to prison, but the sentence should reflect the severity of the crimes. If a shoplifter is sentenced to two years, how can it be that someone convicted for complicity in 10,000 murders is given the same sentence?”

Zuroff explained in 2022 that Furchner’s age at the time of her crimes and subsequent conviction in a juvenile court had impacted the seeming lightness of her sentencing.

“Today’s verdict is the best that could be achieved, given the fact that she was tried in a juvenile court since she was under the age of 21 during her service in the camp,” Zuroff said. “In view of Furchner’s recent statement to the court that she ‘regretted everything,’ we were concerned that the court might accept her defense attorney’s plea for an acquittal. Yet given her claim that she had no knowledge of the murders being committed in the camp, her regret was far from convincing.”

Goldberg also insisted that Furchner must have known of the slaughter she aided from her seat at the typewriter. “Everything was documented and progress reports, including how much human hair had been harvested, sent to her office,” he said.

In response to Furchner’s 2024 appeal, judges wrote that “the principle that typical, neutral professional activities of an ‘everyday nature’ are not criminal does not apply here, since the defendant knew what the main perpetrators were doing and supported them in doing it.”

Lawyer Onur Oezata represented three people who survived Stutthof.

“The secretary was rightly convicted of aiding and abetting murder in several thousand cases,” Oezata said. “The now legally binding guilty verdict is particularly gratifying for my clients. They never wanted revenge or retribution.”

The post Nazi Concentration Camp Secretary Convicted of War Crimes Dies at 99 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Tuesday that Iran can expect tighter sanctions if it does not come to an agreement with President Donald Trump on its nuclear program.

“So absolutely, I would expect very tight sanctions on Iran, and hopefully drive them to abandon their nuclear program,” Wright said in an interview with CNBC.

Wright on Wednesday will launch a nearly two-week tour of three Middle East countries, including Saudi Arabia, marking his first visit as a US official to the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Wright also defended Trump’s executive order, expected later on Tuesday, to boost the coal industry as essential for artificial intelligence data centers, as well as steel production and other industrial activities.

“We need a growing supply of electricity to hit the AI boom and also for this re-industrializing of the United States. If we want to grow America’s electricity production meaningfully over the next five or 10 years, we’ve got to stop closing coal plants,” Wright said in the interview.

Asked about Trump’s comment that the European Union should buy more energy from the United States, Wright said he has had countries in Asia, in Europe and elsewhere reach out to express interest in buying more American energy.”

Wright said he does not think European countries will want to return to Russia for their energy supplies when the war in Ukraine ends.

“As I talk to European leaders, one thing they all share is a regret that they bet their energy future on Russia,” he said. “So, I don’t think there’s a huge desire right now that, when the war is over, we’re going to we’re going to re-count on Russia for a dominant share of our energy supply. I think that’s very unlikely to unfold.”

The post US Energy Secretary Sees Tighter Sanctions on Iran Without Deal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.