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Middle East crisis live: US and Iranian envoys arrive in Islamabad for conditional peace talks

Al Jazeera spotted the Pakistani army chief, Asim Munir, wore a suit to greet the US vice-president today in Islamabad, but wore a military uniform to receive the Iranian delegation last night. The news organisation spoke to a former general who served under Pakistan’s last military ruler Pervez Musharraf about the wardrobe change. The general said there is no protocol on what an army chief wears on such occasions, adding: “Usually, their staff suggests what they should wear, or other times it is the desire of the chief himself, what influence he wants to project. “Under the Musharraf era, when I was in service, he would meet delegations sometimes in uniform and other times in a suit.”

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UK forced to shelve legislation to return Chagos Islands to Mauritius

The UK government has been forced to shelve its legislation to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, after the US dropped its support for the agreement. On Friday, UK government officials acknowledged that they had run out of time to pass legislation within the current parliamentary session, which ends in the coming weeks. The latest setback in the UK’s push to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, which hosts a joint US-UK Diego Garcia military base, is a sign of the worsening US-UK relations after Donald Trump’s heavy criticism of Keir Starmer over his handling of the Iran war. The US president has previously criticised the plan, which is backed by the US state department, telling Starmer he was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for the UK and US being allowed to continue using their airbase. However, earlier in February Trump had described it as the “best” deal the prime minister could make in the circumstances. The US president also endorsed the handover when Starmer visited the White House last year. Under the deal, the UK would cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and lease the largest island of the achipelago, Diego Garcia, for 99 years to continue operating the joint military base there. The US had not formally exchanged letters to amend a 1966 British-American treaty on islands that is understood to have forced the UK to drop its bill. Now, a new Chagos bill is not expected to feature in the king’s speech in May, where the government’s agenda for the coming parliament is revealed. In February, the Guardian reported Trump changed his mind on supporting the deal because the UK would not permit its airbases to be used for a pre-emptive US strike on Iran. Last month, Iran struck the joint military base after warning British lives were in danger, after Starmer authorised the US to carry out further strikes from British bases. At the time, Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, had told MPs that discussions with American counterparts were paused and that the ongoing process through parliament in relation to the treaty would be brought back at an appropriate time. Starmer has allowed US forced to use UK bases, such as Diego Garcia, only for defensive missions against Iran. This month, he faced increase pressure to limit access after Trump threatened “a whole civilisation” would die if Iran ignored his demands, before a ceasefire was later agreed. In an effort to contain the confusion surrounding Falconer’s comments, the Foreign Office said there was no pause or set deadline, and timings would be announced “in the usual way”. The government has been approached for comment.

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Is Iran Trump’s Suez crisis, or just a passing thunderstorm?

Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”. But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown. Trump likes to portray Europe as being under civilisational threat from migration, but this week he threatened that a 7,000-year-old civilisation would “die … never to be brought back” if it did not comply with his demands. He swiftly discovered it was not a threat on which he could follow through, and had to be extricated from it in a rescue mission led by Pakistan and, ignominiously for him, China. He pulled back in a social media post issued just 88 minutes before the implied destruction of Iran. Not for the first time, Trump had disregarded Iran’s history of resilience. As the late Iranian essayist Bastani Parizi once wrote: “Sometimes the fate of this kingdom hangs by a hair, but that hair does not break.” Faced by Iran’s refusal to back down, symbolised by millions of Iranians volunteering to stand on the bridges of their homeland, a late-night White House scramble ensued to find a justification to bring his latest piece of brinkmanship to a semi-dignified end before his ghoulish deadline. Tuesday night’s chaos, entirely self-induced, led to Wednesday’s mess – including the US administration’s claim that “a legitimate misunderstanding” had led Iran to believe the ceasefire covered Lebanon, as the mediators Pakistan insisted. Similarly, the White House asserted that Trump’s explicit acceptance in a social media post that the 10-point plan would form “the framework of the talks”, was in fact a reference to a milder, different plan that is yet to be revealed. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted that the published Iranian plan – written in Farsi and containing full sanctions relief and an Iranian right to enrich uranium – had been merely a Tehran wishlist that Trump had immediately thrown in the garbage. By Thursday, there was zero agreement on what was agreed to secure the two-week ceasefire. Iranian diplomats say the explanation is simple. Trump, once he realised coercive diplomacy had failed and the strait of Hormuz would not be reopened, promised the Pakistani mediators more than he intended to deliver. His only interest, the Iranians say, was to get himself off the hook. Not for the first time in his decade-long dealings with Iran, Trump has proved, from Tehran’s perspective, to be entirely untrustworthy. Faced by a hail of criticism from the right, yet knowing his whole presidency is imperilled by a project he had vowed on the campaign trail to abjure, Trump is reluctant to accept the consequences of his own errors. These include the original sin of being gullible enough to believe the Israeli prime minister, Benjamim Netanyahu, when he said that a war was winnable in days. It is a measure of the extent to which the fate of the two leaders is intertwined that Trump, in the face of worldwide criticism, is reluctant to order a halt to Israeli’s assault on Lebanon. Yet the White House knows Iran cannot desert Hezbollah after it suffered so much by answering Tehran’s call to intervene. With few allies left in the Middle East, and so much hostility created, Iran cannot be seen to abandon its most important Shia ally. As a result, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said the US must choose between ceasefire and continued war via Israel. “It cannot have both. The ball is in the US’s court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” he said. So Trump is trapped, just like the oil tankers awaiting clearance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to chug through the strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump had fruitlessly demanded. Instead it is Trump who is living in hell, as he watches his poll ratings slide in a year of midterm elections. A worldwide mess If one seeks Trump’s current monument, one need only look around. The mess across the world is astonishing. Americans face $4-a-gallon petrol at the pumps. The world economy is unhinged by the worst disruption in the history of the oil market, with the International Monetary Fund predicting lower growth and higher inflation worldwide. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is likely to see Russian coffers swell by anything from $45bn to $151bn over the next year, according to the Kiel Institute thinktank. Across the Gulf region, the crafted aura of stability and modernity looks suddenly fragile. It will take many years for Qatar to repurpose its liquid gas industry. In a sign of the times, British Airways is ending flights to Jeddah from May, in the expectation that tourism will shrivel. A complex debate awaits a divided Gulf Cooperation Council on the security provided by allowing the US to site so many military bases in the region. Inside Iran, schools, universities and medical research centres have been bombed. The US-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran estimates that a total of 3,636 Iranians have been killed, including 1,701 civilians. The trauma is captured in this vignette from the citizen journalism website IranWire: “My husband counted 13 explosions in a row. Women in the neighbourhood were screaming, some on the verge of a nervous breakdown, There was dust – endless dust – that seemed to cling to one’s throat.” Iran started 2026 mired in an economic crisis. This led to one of the biggest outbreaks of popular protest in years, which was brutally suppressed by the regime. Now, the only street demonstrations are regime-backed shows of patriotic solidarity, and the Iranian government looks stronger. The prospect of regime change or at least ideological rethink has receded. One infirm Khamenei has been replaced as supreme leader by another. The Revolutionary Guards may have lost many buildings and missile launchers, but not the ability to wreak havoc across the Gulf, control the strait of Hormuz and “manage” civil society – the true metrics of its authority. The internet remains shut to most after a record six weeks, and since 19 March, six members of the dissident People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran and seven young protesters have been hanged on charges of “moharebeh”, or enmity against God. No one can know whether – once the internet blackout ends and the economy’s travails return to the fore – a call for a different Iran will emerge from the darkness and rubble, framed by the memory of the bloody protests of January. For now, Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remains in place, and the US’s negotiators are starting to hint of concessions as talks in Islamabad approach. JD Vance, the US vice-president, said on Wednesday: “The president said that we don’t want Iran to enrich uranium with a view to developing a nuclear weapon, and we want Iran to give up its nuclear fuel.” He did not formally deny Iran the right to domestic enrichment – the central point of dispute in previous talks brokered by Oman. Iran has already agreed not to build up its nuclear stockpiles. Yet there is a risk that Iran’s leadership, heady at its survival, may now overplay its hand. The country’s former foreign minister Javad Zarif proposed in Foreign Affairs magazine this week that in return for sanctions relief, Tehran should cap domestic uranium enrichment, blend down existing stockpiles of nuclear materials, transfer enriched uranium to a new multilateral consortium, and reopen the strait of Hormuz. The plan was supported by the former president Hassan Rouhani, but pilloried by hardliners in the conservative media and at demonstrations. The test in the Islamabad negotiations, apart from the terms for opening the strait, will be whether the US team can secure something on nuclear they were not already on course to achieve in the Geneva talks that took place immediately before the start of the war. The US still lacks a theory of evolutionary change inside Iran, preferring rupture and revolution, rather than the reform most Iranians appear to favour. Sanctions relief is still the prerequisite for a more modern Iran. If there is anyone that speaks Farsi in the US administration, they have surely not been invited anywhere near the situation room. The European angle Faced by such incompetence and recklessness, Europe now faces a choice about how hard it tries to maintain the US alliance. Europe in the short term deserves to fume, as the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has started to do. Europe was excluded from the nuclear talks, declined to support a war over which it was not consulted and did not believe necessary, and has repeatedly been blamed by Trump for refusing to “be there” for the US. But the internal rifts that divided Europe over the 2003 Iraq war have not been replicated – either over the war’s necessity or Lebanon’s inclusion in the truce. Instead, Britain and Spain, the two European countries most supportive of George W Bush, have been clear opponents of the war – albeit deploying very differing timbres. For all that Trump has belittled Starmer as no Winston Churchill, the UK prime minister has refused to join the White House in pretending war is a Call of Duty video game in which you can die and get to play again. In 2003, the Downing Street comms team tried to persuade President Bush not to deploy cowboy vocabulary, warning him it alienated potential support in the UK. This time there is no constraining advice. Iran does not hold back on the polemics, but the language used by the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has been crude, cruel, and sometimes to the European ear, little short of repulsive. It serves only to widen the Atlantic. A Politico poll this week found that only 12% of those polled in March in Poland, Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy saw the US as a close ally, while 36% saw it as a threat. By contrast, China was seen as a threat by 29% of those polled across the six countries. The transatlantic alliance, institutionalised through Nato, presupposes consent not only within the White House, but also among the people of Europe. Washington can pretend it does not care if it loses allies, even as it dispatches the vice-president to Hungary to try to prop up the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. But what it cannot countenance is no longer being feared. Might is right is, after all, what Trump offers the modern world. American military and technological power is of course unmatched. US defence spending is equal to the defence budgets of its next eight largest allies combined. But despite the massive destruction and the billions spent, force has failed to win the day in Iran. Decapitation plus air power may destroy a state, but it cannot occupy it. Historical parallels Whether this is the US’s Suez crisis, a perfect failure, or “essentially a passing thunderstorm” – as some in 1956 insisted Suez represented – is now the question. But wars, especially badly misjudged wars, tend to accelerate pre-existing change, and the parallels with Suez are too numerous to ignore. Faced by the nationalisation of the Suez canal – an artificial waterway of similar commercial strategic importance to nature’s strait of Hormuz – the then British prime minister, Anthony Eden, announced that Gamal Abdel Nasser, then president of Egypt, could not “be allowed to have his thumb on our windpipe”. Nasser retorted that if the British and French did not like what he had done, they could “choke to death on their fury”. Britain and France applied sanctions, with London holding a 15-nation conference to assert the legal rights of a Suez Canal Users Association. With diplomacy floundering, Eden even contemplated the assassination of Nasser. When France, the UK and Israel cooked up a plan to re-occupy the canal and remove Nasser, the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, intervened to stop it. Eisenhower disapproved of Britain’s actions for many reasons, including regarding Suez as an unnecessary distraction from a more important conflict in Europe’s East – the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of an uprising in Hungary. Only Australia backed Britain, while Pakistan threatened to leave the Commonwealth. Anti-war protests sprung up across the UK and senior civil servants resigned in protest, saying experts had been systematically sidelined. Evelyn Shuckburgh, the Foreign Office official for Middle Eastern policy, was not alone in deciding “Eden had gone off his head”. What Britain had hoped to prevent by its actions in November 1956, it actually succeeded in guaranteeing. Egypt maintained control of the canal with the support of the UN and the US. The canal was closed to traffic for five months as a result of ships sunk by the Egyptians. British access to fuel and oil became limited and resulted in shortages. Nasser emerged from the crisis much strengthened, with Britain’s decline in the Middle East exposed. Harold Beeley, a British diplomat in the Foreign Office at the time who later served as ambassador to Egypt, believed Suez was a “disastrous adventure” that showed Britain could no longer enforce its will through major military action. Stories of the end of the American empire have long been in circulation, of course. Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said in a seminar last month: “If the American era is over, nobody told the Americans, and they certainly did not tell Trump. But we may be in a paradoxical situation where the US is still the dominant player in the world, but not promoting a liberal order, and that seems to me to be the heart of the problem.” Asked who would be the architect of a new order, in the absence of the US, Cox answered China. But in the same seminar, Prof John Ikenberry, one of the world’s leading liberal international theorists, answered that the liberal order could come back. The Princeton professor insisted the virtues of the liberal order – open trade, institutions that enforce rules, democracy, interdependence – remain robust and more attractive than the alternatives, including “fractured zones of micro-imperial oppression”. But the future role the US will play in any new order is unclear. Judging by the recent Mansion House speech given by Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, Britain’s security still requires relations with the US to endure at least until Europe shows it can be responsible for its own defence. At another LSE seminar, the political scientist Nathalie Tocci argued that defence work needs speeding up, and to be made genuinely European. Something fundamental has changed in the liberal leviathan America, she said. It was now “neither liberal nor a leviathan”. As a personality, Trump may be Levin’s once in a century aberration, but he is also the tip of an iceberg, Tocci argued, in which structural irreversible forces will diminish US hegemony. If that is indeed the case, it will be the greatest of ironies, as Iran – nominally a backward-looking country – will be the midwife of a new era.

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Swedish exhibition explores life of 18th-century Black diarist

In 1760, a Black child around 10 years old arrived at the Swedish royal court as a “gift” to the queen. Adolf Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albrecht Couschi, who became known as Badin (derived from the French for joker or prankster), later held titles including chamberlain, court secretary, ballet master and civil servant. He is thought to have been born into slavery between 1747 and 1750 in the former Danish colony of St Croix (now part of the US Virgin Islands), where he was “owned” by Christian Lebrecht von Pröck, who took him to Denmark. He was “received” by Gustaf de Brunck, a Swedish councillor of commerce, who later “donated” Badin to Queen Louisa Ulrika. When Badin died, he left behind diaries, a vast book collection, private letters and an autobiography offering a window into his life in 18th- and 19th-century Stockholm. Yet he remains vastly under-researched and in many ways overlooked by the Swedish public, despite featuring in fictionalised form in multiple works, including a racist depiction in August Strindberg’s 1902 play Gustav III and, more recently, a ballet, Gustavia, at the Royal Swedish Opera. A landmark exhibition at the National Museum in Stockholm aims to change that by offering a fuller understanding of his life and the role he played in Swedish society. The exhibition, Badin – Beyond Surface and Mask, includes his writings, which are on display together for the first time, and a specially commissioned film by Salad Hilowle, an artist who has dedicated much of his career to Badin. Hilowle said the commission felt like a significant moment for Swedish art history to give recognition to Badin, and also for himself as an African-Swedish artist. “I’m always talking about how he [Badin] was an image and he was the other and now the other is also an artist. Time has changed in Sweden. It’s a super strong moment.” His film, Maroonen (The Marooned), is based on Badin’s own words and imagines Badin giving a lecture to current students at Uppsala in which he reflects on his life and how he has been portrayed over time. He said it had come out of his frustration that interest in Badin was often limited to his image rather than his words. “He pops up everywhere, from August Strindberg plays about Gustav III and then also other projects,” Hilowle said. “The image of him is everywhere but no one seems to hear or read his own voice.” He also uses opera in his film to explore Badin’s writing. In one of his texts, Badin wrote in Swedish: “I as one of the Blacks.” In the film, these words are sung by an opera singer walking around the museum. “I took it into the opera singing because I wanted to hear that. How does it feel when you hear that?” Hilowle said. According to Swedish population records, there were about 20 people of African origin in Sweden between the early 18th and early 19th centuries. Very little is known about their experiences because there are no records. Badin is a significant exception, although given his status in the royal court, his experiences are not thought to be representative. “He has an in-between position in the court,” said Åsa Bharathi Larsson, the exhibition’s curator and an art and media historian at Södertörn University. “He is free but he isn’t part of the royal family. We don’t know anything about his real family, but he has a status and a different relationship with the royal family than perhaps other court servants had.” The queen raised Badin in accordance with the ideals of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed boys should be allowed to develop freely and think independently. He had a Christian education and learned to write, which was very unusual for the time, and later became involved in dance and theatre. Using Badin’s diary as a starting point, Hilowle’s key concept was to give Badin recognition and dignity, but also to show him as “very sensitive and fragile”. He said: “That tenderness is not what we are seeing when we think about the Black subject in relation to culture in Sweden.” Hilowle believes Badin’s assumed name as the joker could have been a means of survival. “Meaning that he couldn’t manifest how well-educated he was because then he would be a threat to people and therefore he is playing the trickster,” he said. “But at the same time he writes his own diary.” Through his diary, Hilowle added, Badin “writes himself into history”. Hilowle, who previously made another film about Badin and plans to make a third, still has many unanswered questions. “I am very curious about – how did you survive? What ways did you survive? Because there is also a lot of grief. It’s very interesting because it had to cost him a lot. And being in those spaces and being almost like a cameo, shapeshifting.”

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Trump warns of fresh strikes if Iran talks fail – as it happened

Thank you for joining us. We are closing this blog from now, but you can continue to follow all the latest developments at our new blog going live here.

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Ukraine war briefing: doubts linger in Kyiv over Moscow’s promise to uphold Orthodox Easter ceasefire

Ukrainians on Friday were wary of Russia’s pledge to pause fighting for an Orthodox Easter ceasefire – first proposed by Kyiv – this weekend. The Kremlin said it had ordered a temporary truce to be in effect from Saturday afternoon until the end of Sunday, a 32-hour period during which Russia would stop fighting “in all directions”. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy – who has repeatedly called for a ceasefire in the four-year war – said Kyiv was willing to reciprocate. But in Kyiv there was scepticism over whether Moscow would keep to its promise. “No one believes in these fairytales anymore,” Yevgeniy Lamakh, an IT specialist, told AFP in central Kyiv. “The Russian military lie a lot, usually, as history shows. And in general, they say one thing, but in fact do something completely different,” the 29-year-old said. “Even today... Shaheds, missiles are flying at Ukraine. Well, come on then, start the ceasefire,” Dmytro Sova, a 42-year-old actor, told AFP in Kyiv on Friday. Just hours before the Orthodox Easter truce, two night-time Russian attacks in Ukraine left one dead and 15 injured, authorities said. The fatal attacks included an “enemy drone attack” on a store and a cafe in the central town of Poltava, killing one person and injuring another, the regional head of the military administration, Vitalii Diakivnych, posted on Telegram. In the north-eastern region of Sumy, bordering Russia, drone strikes on residential areas wounded 14 people including a 14-year-old boy and an 87-year-old woman, according to Oleg Grygorov, head of the regional military administration there, via Telegram. Moscow has rejected calls for a longer-term unconditional ceasefire, something that Kyiv has called for, saying it is instead pushing for a final peace settlement. Negotiations between the two sides, brokered by the United States, have stalled over the fate of Ukraine’s eastern regions, partly occupied by Russia and that Moscow wants Kyiv to cede. The two sides also held a ceasefire for the Orthodox Easter last year. But the respite comes amid deadlocked efforts to halt Russia’s invasion, with US attention now focused on the Middle East war. US president Donald Trump’s administration is likely to extend as soon as Friday a waiver allowing countries to buy some sanctioned Russian oil and petroleum products, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The US treasury department has allowed purchases of Russian oil and products at sea since mid-March with a 30-day waiver that expires on 11 April, part of efforts to control global energy prices during the US-Israeli war with Iran. The waivers have been criticised by politicians in the US and abroad as they could complicate the West’s efforts to deprive Russia of revenue for its war in Ukraine and put Washington at odds with its allies. A Russian court on Friday placed a journalist from the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper in pre-trial detention until 10 May, a day after police raided the paper’s Moscow headquarters. Oleg Roldugin was arrested on Thursday. He had reported on alleged corruption among top Russian officials including former president Dmitry Medvedev and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Russia has waged a crackdown on independent news outlets since launching its offensive on Ukraine in February 2022. Nato member Estonia will refrain from detaining Russia’s “shadow fleet” vessels in the Baltic Sea, worried that seizing oil tankers and other ships sanctioned by the West could lead Moscow to defend them militarily, a senior commander said on Friday. Britain and other European nations, including France, Belgium and Sweden, have stepped up efforts to detain ageing tankers used by Moscow to secure vital funding for its four-year war against Ukraine. But Estonia, the northernmost Baltic state located close to Russia’s main oil and fuel export facilities in the Gulf of Finland, is practicing restraint after an unsuccessful attempt to board a Russian vessel last year.

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JD Vance dispatched to negotiate Iran peace with few cards to play

As JD Vance arrives in Islamabad to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, his first high-profile assignment of the war looks to be a poisoned chalice. Vance, a vocal opponent of US wars in the Middle East gone quiet since the beginning of the current military campaign, will now face off with Iranian negotiators who feel emboldened by their new control of the Hormuz strait and their resilience in the face of the largest US-Israeli onslaught in history. Vance’s presence at the talks as vice-president will make it the highest-level meeting since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Vance’s task is straightforward enough: to bridge the gap between a rhetorical ceasefire in serious peril and a more durable peace. But Vance will be face a difficult choice in Islamabad: to either undersign considerable US concessions to Iran in order to hold the ceasefire and negotiate the opening of the strait of Hormuz – or effectively cut off negotiations, personally backing a return to war that is unpopular with the American public. The results could have a considerable impact on his expected run for the presidency in 2028, where his Maga credentials are already in question for failing to offer a more full-throated opposition to the war. Vance entered office calling for a more restrained foreign policy and an end to US forever wars in the Middle East – but the negotiations could drag him further into the largest US intervention in the region since the beginning of the Iraq war. Whether the negotiations will even begin is in question. Israel’s massive strikes on Lebanon and an apparent bait-and-switch over the country’s inclusion in the ceasefire has angered the Iranian leadership. And Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and a lead negotiator, said that the US must also furnish the “release of Iran’s blocked assets”, a condition for talks that the US has not publicly agreed to. “These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” Ghalibaf said on Friday, less than 24 hours after the negotiations in Islamabad were due to begin. Those remarks may be the first salvo of what will be a grueling experience for Vance. Tehran’s negotiators are renowned for a long-winded, relentless approach to deal making that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had once called “market style” – meaning “continuous and tireless bargaining”. This will be their first chance in history to subject a sitting US vice-president under considerable pressure to cut a deal to that treatment. Before boarding Air Force Two en route to Pakistan on Friday, Vance said that his negotiating team had received “clear” instructions from Donald Trump on the negotiations, and added: “Let’s see where this goes.” “As the president of the United States said, if the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand,” Vance told reporters. “If they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive.” But before the meeting, former US negotiators with Iran said that Tehran’s assumed control of the strait of Hormuz had handed that government a powerful new weapon in negotiations with Washington. And while the US could walk away from the table in Islamabad, it cannot guarantee the free flow of marine traffic from the Gulf, leaving Tehran with key leverage over the White House, as fuel shortages and a supply chain crisis could rock the global economy this summer. Vance’s dispatch to Islamabad follows his trip to Hungary, where he travelled to stump for the country’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orbán, in an election on Sunday that he looks likely to lose, ending 16 years in power and striking a blow to one of Maga’s key international outposts as part of a rightwing International that has been backed by Vance. The Hungarians had lobbied for a visit by Trump, but they received Vance instead, who lacks the president’s star power and was questioned for travelling on a campaign rally to Europe even as the US administration was entrenched in the conflict in Iran. From the beginning, Vance had been peripheral to the administration’s messaging about the war in Iran. As Trump’s war team gathered at a makeshift situation room in Florida (some termed it War-a-Lago), Vance called in from the situation room at the White House, joined by another key anti-war voice of Trump’s administration, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, has regularly delivered televised briefings on the conflict and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has been a more public booster for the war than Vance. “He was, I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me,” Trump said of Vance’s feeling about the war. “I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic. But I felt it was something we had to do. I didn’t feel we had a choice.” Now, Vance has been tapped to end the war that he is said not to have wanted. But his reappearance in the limelight will be fraught with risk. • This article was amended on 11 April 2026 to remove an erroneous reference to the Red Sea in a subheading.

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‘That’ll be the end’: actor Sam Neill joins fight to stop controversial goldmine near his New Zealand vineyard

The grapevines in Sam Neill’s vineyard in Central Otago – a picturesque region known for its undulating hills and wines – are pregnant with pinot noir grapes, almost ripe for picking as autumn arrives. “My family has been here for over 150 years. I’m connected to this land like nowhere else on earth,” the 78-year-old actor and winemaker says. “It’s perfect for wine. It’s great for tourism. And it’s one of the most beautiful and strange, remote places in the world.” But this unblemished landscape could soon change permanently. Mere kilometres from Neill’s vineyard lies the Dunstan mountains, shrouded in a crown of clouds. It is an area legally enshrined as “outstanding natural landscape” by the Central Otago district council, and it is in those ranges Australian mining company Santana Minerals is pushing to expedite a controversial 1,000 metre by 850 metre open-cast goldmine, called Bendigo-Ophir. In November, the company applied for consent from the New Zealand government to tap into an estimated $6.75bn of gold deposits. Located 20km north of Cromwell in a region where a gold rush exploded in 1861, Bendigo-Ophir has been dubbed by its proponents as the country’s most significant gold discovery in decades. But the proposed goldmine has ignited a fierce division between communities. Local environmental group Sustainable Tarras views the mine as a fast track to environmental destruction and a threat to tourism in one of New Zealand’s best wine-producing regions, which also has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Post-Covid, two New Zealands are emerging: one that draws tourists globally to its Lord of the Rings-esque landscapes; and another, where the government has moved to abolish its dedicated environment ministry and is fast-tracking mining projects it says will boost the economy. Critics claim Bendigo-Ophir mine will dampen tourism and threaten up to 650,000 native lizards, which Santana Minerals disputes. Opponents have also warned that a dam storing toxic waste from the mine could burst in an earthquake, a claim the company calls unfounded. A Sustainable Tarras spokesperson says this “industrial-scale mine in the middle of one of New Zealand’s most pristine and iconic districts is not just a major risk to our environment, it’s also damaging to New Zealand’s ‘clean, green, 100% pure’ reputation.” Neill, best known globally for his role in the Jurassic Park movie franchise, is backing the group and has presented a mini-documentary for the cause. “I’m not against mining. I’m against this mine,” says Neill, who has grown wine under his Two Paddocks label in the region for 30 years. “If this mine goes ahead – and God willing it won’t – everything that you see [there] is under a claim [by the mining company]. And there will be mining all around us, and that’ll be the end.” The Bendigo-Ophir goldmine is among hundreds of applications being considered under the coalition government’s controversial fast-track law, which prompted thousands to march in protest in 2024 and nearly 30,000 public submissions on the bill. The resources minister, Shane Jones – a self-avowed disciple of the “drill, baby, drill” mantra – says the mine will create 357 jobs and indirectly support another 500 jobs annually. He wants New Zealand to double its mineral mining exports by 2035. Tarras local Mark Davidson, 64, who has worked in farming and the wine industry, says the mine is a local solution to record numbers of New Zealanders leaving the country – most departing for Australia. “It’s getting harder and harder to put a deposit on a house,” Davidson says. “If the economy here was better, I think you’d find that a lot of people overseas would come home.” He claims most locals are in favour of the mine. The prospective mine will be assessed under the fast-track law, which can expedite energy, mining, roads and other large projects. Some fast-track applications include “zombie projects” – such as a previously rejected hydro scheme on the Waitaha river. Despite being rejected in 2019 under Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government, it was provisionally approved under the fast-track law in March. The former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark accuses the current government of having “little regard” for the environment. “Its fast-track legislation overrides key environmental and conservation protection laws. It is amending planning law over all in favour of development,” she says. Hayden Johnston, a local businessman of Māori Ngāi Tahu and Scottish descent, runs a wedding venue and the Kuru Kuru winery within 5km of the mine site. The opencast mine won’t be visible from his venue. But its processing plant will operate 24 hours every day under a 30-year permit, so he says it will probably be heard, a claim Santana Minerals says is not supported by modelling data. Johnston, who has run his wine label for 24 years, says: “We would never have created a world-class wine region [here] in Bendigo if we knew there was going to be an opencast pit among us.” Growing grapes is sustainable, he says. “Gold is a one-off. You crush the land. You make a huge, toxic legacy, but you can only take the gold out once.” The mining industry has a long history of environmental disasters caused by poorly stored waste in tailings dams – a type of dam that will also be built for Bendigo-Ophir. Poisonous waste, including arsenic, will be stored there in perpetuity. Prominent Māori businessman Ian Taylor worries about the 600km-long alpine fault running down the South Island. “[The dam] is going to hold toxic material in an area that has a seismic zone,” he says. “The liability or the risk we are placing – or Santana is placing – will last generations after they are gone.” Santana Minerals states the dam has been carefully designed to withstand a one-in-10,000-year earthquake, and insists “there is no credible long-term failure mode that could result in a breach”. The company rejects its mine will negatively affect tourism, and says it is investing $10m in two lizard sanctuaries, totalling 67 hectares. The majority of the hundreds of jobs created, it says, will stay in the region. Many of the claims opposing the mine lack evidence, it says. “Critics have produced fear,” the company says. A few kilometres from the proposed site, the only remnants of the 19th-century Central Otago gold rush are scars from dynamite blasts and rosehip bushes planted by Chinese miners. For mine supporter Davidson, concerns over the tailings dam are unfounded. “The miners back in the 1800s didn’t really give a toss about the environment,” he says. “Times have changed … Now, you’ve got things like the Environmental Protection Agency who make sure that things are done properly.” But since taking office in 2023, New Zealand’s rightwing coalition government has faced growing criticism for its environment and climate policy agenda. Under the previous government, Ardern had promised to ban new mines on conservation land – but the three parties in government failed to reach an agreement over the proposal. However, in 2018, they did halt the granting of new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. Jones has described Ardern’s permit ban as “the most destructive decision in the history of New Zealand’s industry”, and he has promised to restart exploration. Jones declined to comment on the mine. A decision on Bendigo-Ophir mine is expected by the end of the year. Back at Neill’s farm he points out the native trees and the vineyards he has personally grown and tended to for decades. Mounds of dirt punctuate the horizon stretching ahead of Neill’s vineyard from another mine. For Neill, it is not simply an eyesore. “I own land, but I’m not a land owner. The land is part of me, and I’m a part of the land,” Neill said, referring to the Māori concept of kaitiakitanga, being a custodian for future generations. “It comes with a responsibility, and you need to leave the land better than you found it.”