BAGHDAD (AP) — Regional leaders were to meet in Baghdad on Saturday at the annual summit of the Arab League, with the war in Gaza expected to once again loom large. In March, at an emergency summit in Cairo, Arab leaders endorsed a proposed plan for reconstruction of the Gaza Strip without displacing its roughly 2 million residents. Saturday’s summit comes two months after after Israel ended a ceasefire reached…

Iran is set to hold talks with Britain, France and Germany in Turkey on Friday, after US President Donald Trump said a nuclear deal with Tehran was “getting close”. The Istanbul meeting follows Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s warning of “irreversible” consequences if the European powers move to reimpose United Nations sanctions on Iran that were lifted under a 2015 deal. The so-called E3 were parties to that agreement along with China,…

The Iranian middle class, long a force of political moderation, stability, economic growth, and the base of the country’s reform movement, is shrinking fast under the pressure of Western sanctions, researchers say. Left in its wake are rising societal resentments and an ever-increasing wealth gap. A study published in the European Journal of Political Economy has used an innovative method to investigate…

Citizen Lab found that an online network pushed out deepfake videos during Israel’s airstrikes on Tehran’s Evin Prison. An investigation by TheMarker and Haaretz reveals the Persian-language online campaigns indirectly funded by Israel In early 2023, Reza Pahlavi made his first official visit to Israel. He’s the son of the last shah of Iran, who was overthrown in the 1979…

A few weeks ago, in a public act at the White House, with Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, surprised, Donald Trump – the man whom the prime minister and his followers are convinced they have in their pocket – announced that the United States was opening direct, high-level talks with Iran. The gap between what the U.S. president is doing…