Iran nuclear talks deadline extended

“On any given day, if we feel that we’re just not going to get there, that will be that”. “Either this works in the next 48 hours or it doesn’t”.

Mogherini said that the continuation of the talks did not represent a formal extension and negotiators insisted that the talks would need to reach a conclusion soon.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-sponsor of legislation that requires congressional review of any Iran deal, said Sunday that he hopes US negotiators “take their time and finish this in the best way that they can”.

Menendez, the ex- ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, has advocated for a pact that would allow sanctions to be put back in place quickly if Iran violates terms of the deal, The Hill notes. Iran, for its part, maintains the programme is peaceful. But the text contains many brackets highlighting areas of dispute.

Global powers seeking to hammer home a deal to curtail Iran’s suspect nuclear program have missed another deadline, with all sides vowing to now keep working until the end of the week.

European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who is chairing the talks, has hinted the negotiations will not be extended to another round.

The United States “won’t walk away from the table as long as the negotiations continue to be useful”, he added.

They seek to cap, restrict, monitor and partially roll back Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, after toiling with the prospect of a nuclear Iran for over a decade.

“Iran is ready to strike a fair and balanced deal and prepared to open new horizons to address the shared challenges of far greater magnitude”, Zarif wrote in a commentary piece in the Financial Times.

A successful deal could change balance of power in the Middle East, the biggest milestone in decades towards easing hostility between Iran and the United States, foes since Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Their Russian, Chinese, French and British counterparts had already left. If a deal is not provided to Congress by Thursday, its review period doubles from 30 days to 60 days, giving opponents in the Capitol more time to mobilize.

“I can assure you that there remains one major problem that’s related to sanctions: this is the problem of an arms embargo”, Lavrov told Interfax from Vienna. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was more strident.“The agreement of concessions that Iran is set to get from the world powers paves the way for it to arm itself with nuclear weaponry and to distribute it even more through the missiles it continues to develop, ” he said. Iran is under a United Nations Security Council demand that it come clean about any past nuclear weapons work, and neutral experts agree that no deal would be verifiable without that full accounting.