Iran

Iran’s Supreme Leader has officially endorsed the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi as the country’s next president – two days before his inauguration.

Iran’s President-elect Ebrahim Raisi has said diplomats will continue with negotiations to reach a nuclear deal but that he won’t meet President Joe Biden.

Iranians are voting to elect a new President, with the hardline judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi widely tipped to win.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has dismissed the latest overtures aimed at saving the nuclear deal between Iran and major world powers as “not worth looking at”. Informal discussions on the deal are underway in Vienna, but plans to move into more formal talks have been thrown into disarray by the attack on Iran’s nuclear…

We were joined by Nazanin’s sister-in-law Rebecca Ratcliffe.

The British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe has had her ankle tag removed at the end of her five year sentence – although she’s been ordered to return to court in Tehran on Sunday and can’t yet return home to London. Her husband Richard Radcliffe described it as a “mixed day” – although Nazanin was “genuinely…

Iran’s Health Ministry has updated the number of people who’ve died there to 237 , but there are fears that the total may be much higher.

Tomorrow’s election takes Iran into uncharted waters. It takes place after many of the candidates were disqualified by the ruling authority.

We asked the Foreign Office for an interview, but no one was available from the government. In a statement earlier today the Foreign Secretary urged all parties to de-escalate, saying “further conflict is in none of our interests”. We speak to Mustafa Salim, in Baghdad for the Washington Post, a US former senior policy adviser…

We spoke to Mohammad Marandi, who’s a professor at the University of Tehran, and asked him for his reaction to the claim that the attack was based on firm intelligence that hundreds of American  lives were at risk…

Foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman is in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Amid calls for restraint across the world, in Washington, leading Democrats called it a “dangerous escalation” which could leave the US on the brink of another major conflict .

President Trump declared that general Qassem Soleimani “should have been taken out years ago”.

The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blamed Iran for yesterday’s drone attacks on two key Saudi oilfields – calling it an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. 

Western policy towards Iran is one of the most contentious issues at this summit, pitting Donald Trump against the others – a question of G1 against G6. Well this afternoon the French sprung a surprise on their guests by inviting the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif here. Jackie Long spoke to Trita Parsi, who is…