The United States and Iran will hold a new round of nuclear talks Sunday in Oman, officials said, just ahead of a visit to the region by President Donald Trump.Trump, who will visit three other Gulf Arab monarchies next week, has voiced hope for reaching a deal with Tehran to avert an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear program that could ignite a wider war.Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Oman, which has been mediating, had proposed Sunday as the date and both sides had accepted.”Negotiations are moving ahead and naturally, the more we advance, the more consultations we have, and the more time the delegations need to examine the issues,” he said in a video carried by Iranian media.”But what’s important is that we are moving forward so that we gradually get into the details,” Araghchi said.Steve Witkoff, Trump’s friend who has served as his globe-trotting negotiator, will take part in the talks, the fourth since Trump returned to the White House, according to a source familiar with arrangements.”As in the past, we expect both direct and indirect discussions,” the person said on condition of anonymity.Iranian and US representatives voiced optimism after the previous talks that took place in Oman and Rome, saying there was a friendly atmosphere despite the two countries’ four decades of enmity.But the two sides are not believed to have gone into technical detail, and basic questions remain.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has insisted that Iran give up all uranium enrichment, even for civilian purposes. He has instead raised the possibility of Iran importing enriched uranium for any civilian energy.Witkoff initially voiced more flexibility before backtracking.- ‘Blow ’em up nicely’ -Trump himself has acknowledged tensions in his policy on Iran, saying at the start of his second term that hawkish advisors were pushing him to step up pressure reluctantly.In an interview Thursday, Trump said he wanted “total verification” that Iran’s contested nuclear work is shut down but through diplomacy.”I’d much rather make a deal” than see military action, Trump told the conservative radio Hugh Hewitt.”There are only two alternatives — blow ’em up nicely or blow ’em up viciously,” Trump said.Trump in his first term withdrew from a nuclear agreement with Tehran negotiated by former president Barack Obama that allowed Iran to enrich uranium at low levels that could be used only for civilian purposes.Many Iran watchers doubted that Iran would ever voluntarily dismantle its entire nuclear program and give up all enrichment.But Iran has found itself in a weaker place over the past year. Israel has decimated Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia backed by Iran that could launch a counter-attack in any war, and Iran’s main ally in the Arab world, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was toppled in December.Israel also struck Iranian air defenses as the two countries came openly to blows in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, which is also supported by Iran’s clerical state.The Trump administration has kept piling on sanctions despite the talks, angering Iran. On Thursday, the United States imposed sanctions on another refinery in China, the main market for Iranian oil.Since Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama-era deal, the United States has used its power to try to stop all other countries from buying Iranian oil.

The United States’ measles outbreak has surpassed 1,000 confirmed cases with three deaths so far, state and local data showed Friday, marking a stark resurgence of a vaccine-preventable disease that the nation once declared eliminated.The surge comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to undermine confidence in the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine — a highly effective shot he has falsely claimed is dangerous and contains fetal debris.An AFP tally showed there have been at least 1,012 cases since the start of the year, with Texas accounting for more than 70 percent.A vaccine-skeptical Mennonite Christian community straddling the Texas–New Mexico border has been hit particularly hard.A federal database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lagged behind state and county reporting, as the globally renowned health agency faces deep workforce and budget cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration.North Dakota is the latest state to report an outbreak, with nine cases so far. Around 180 school students have been forced to quarantine at home, according to the North Dakota Monitor.”This is a virus that’s the most contagious infectious disease of mankind and it’s now spreading like wildfire,” Paul Offit a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told AFP.He warned the true case count could be far higher, as people shy away from seeking medical attention. “Those three deaths equal the total number of deaths from measles in the last 25 years in this country.”The fatalities so far include two young girls in Texas and an adult in New Mexico, all unvaccinated — making it the deadliest US measles outbreak in decades.It is also the highest number of cases since 2019, when outbreaks in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey resulted in 1,274 infections but no deaths.- Vaccine misinformation -Nationwide immunization rates have been dropping in the United States, fueled by misinformation about vaccines, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The CDC recommends a 95 percent vaccination rate to maintain herd immunity.However, measles vaccine coverage among kindergartners has dropped from 95.2 percent in the 2019–2020 school year to 92.7 percent in 2023–2024.Measles is a highly contagious respiratory virus spread through droplets when an infected person coughs, sneezes or simply breathes.Known for its characteristic rash, it poses a serious risk to unvaccinated individuals, including infants under 12 months who are not ordinarily eligible for vaccination, and those with weakened immune systems.Before the measles vaccine’s introduction in 1963, it is thought that millions of Americans contracted the disease annually, and several hundred died. While measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, outbreaks persist each year.Susan McLellan, an infectious disease professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch, pushed back against messaging that promotes remedies like Vitamin A — which has valid but limited uses — over vaccines.Kennedy has led that messaging in frequent appearances on Fox News.”Saying we’re going to devote resources to studying therapies instead of enhancing uptake of the vaccine is a profoundly inefficient way of addressing a vaccine-preventable disease,” she told AFP.McLellan added that the crisis reflects broader erosion in public trust in health authorities.She said it is hard for an individual untrained in statistics to understand measles is a problem if they don’t personally see deaths around them. “Believing population-based statistics takes a leap, and that’s public health.”

San Francisco’s main public transport system abruptly shut down Friday morning, stopping all trains in the Bay Area and throwing the morning commute into chaos.”Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice,” said a message on the Bay Area Rapid Transit website.”Seek alternate means of transport.”The shutdown left tens of thousands of commuters scrambling to find other ways to work.Pictures showed crowds of people pressing aboard buses, while reports said both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge — key routes into and out of the city — were clogged.Unlike many major US cities, San Francisco has a well developed public transport network that includes an underground train network, buses, trams and ferries that traverse the bay between San Francisco and other cities in the region.The closure of the BART train system, whose 131 miles (210 kilometres) of track carry more than 174,000 passengers every day, appeared to be related to how the system had powered up after overnight maintenance, communications officer Alicia Trost told ABC7.There was no immediate indication that the problems had been the result of a cyberattack, she said.The halt caused misery for those trying to get to work.David Meland told the San Francisco Chronicle he had waited in vain outside his local station for an hour to see if the service would resume.”It’s happened a lot. BART’s just too inconsistent,” he said. “This is pretty bad.”Patrick Dunn, who had driven to an exurban station to ride into the city said he was going to have to switch transport.”Now I have to take the bus, and I never take the bus,” he told the Chronicle.”I already have a long commute and now I have to wait for the (bus). I’ll be late by an half hour or so.”The shutdown came on the day that the overstretched airport in Newark, one of three serving greater New York, also suffered an outage — the second in the last few weeks.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said there “was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display” at the same Philadelphia traffic control station that guides aircraft in and out of Newark’s airspace.The outage occurred around 03:55 (07:55 GMT) on Friday and “lasted approximately 90 seconds,” a short statement said.