Skip to main content

US will not interfere in EU trade with Iran: Tillerson

WASHINGTON: The United States does not aim to impede European trade and business transactions with Iran despite President Donald Trump’s decision last week to decertify the 2015 nuclear agreement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the Wall Street Journal.
European Union leaders in Brussels on Thursday highlighted the need to protect their companies and investors dealing with Iran from any adverse effects should c against Iran, officials said.“The president’s been pretty clear that it’s not his intent to interfere with business deals that the Europeans may have under way with Iran,” Tillerson told the Journal in an interview Thursday. “He’s said it clearly: ‘That’s fine. You guys do what you want to do.'”
Trump last week adopted a harsh new approach to Iran by refusing to certify its compliance with the nuclear deal struck with the United States and five other powers including Britain, France and Germany.
The Republican president gave Congress 60 days to decide whether to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran, lifted under the pact in exchange for scaling down a program the West fears was aimed at building a nuclear bomb, something Tehran denies.
Trump has criticized the nuclear accord as “the worst deal ever” and has vowed to withdraw if Congress and European allies do not address his problems with it. Tillerson’s comments appeared aimed at reassuring the Europeans that Washington is not trying to pressure them into avoiding business with Iran.
“We’ve been working with the Europeans for six months,” Tillerson said. “They have been brought along with this same thought process. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily agree entirely with it. … Now we will start a more formalized process with them now that the policy’s been adopted.”
The Journal said Tillerson would not discuss the multibillion-dollar deals reached by Boeing Co under the 2015 accord. Boeing, which was the first major US company to announce a major business venture with Iran, last year agreed to sell dozens of commercial planes to Tehran.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

US trio win Nobel for finding Einstein’s gravitational waves

STOCKHOLM/LONDON:  Three US scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for opening up a new era of astronomy by detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time foreseen by Albert Einstein a century ago. The work of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne crowned half a century of experimental efforts by scientists and engineers.Measuring gravitational waves offers a new way to observe the cosmos, helping scientists explore the nature of mysterious objects including black holes and neutron stars. It may also provide insight into the universe’s very earliest moments. The first detection of the waves created a scientific sensation when it was announced early last year and the teams involved in the discovery had been widely seen as favourites for Tuesday’s prize. “We now witness the dawn of a new field: gravitational wave astronomy,” Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters. “This will teach us about the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liquid cats, crocodile bets and didgeridoos win Ig Nobel science prizes

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS:  Scientists taking on the deep questions of whether cats are liquid or solid, how holding a crocodile influences gambling and whether playing the didgeridoo can help cure snoring were honored Thursday at the Ig Nobel Prize spoof awards. The prizes are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and are intended not to honor the best or worst in science, but rather to highlight research that encourages people to think in unusual ways. “We hope that this will get people back into the habits they probably had when they were kids of paying attention to odd things and holding out for a moment and deciding whether they are good or bad only after they have a chance to think,” Abrahams said in a phone interview. Some of the honorees tend towards the spurious: French researcher Marc-Antoine Fardin’s 2014 study “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” was inspired by internet photos of cats tucked into glasses, buckets...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mexicans dig through collapsed buildings as quake kills 217

MEXICO CITY:  Police, firefighters and ordinary Mexicans dug frantically through the rubble of collapsed schools, homes and apartment buildings early Wednesday, looking for survivors of Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in decades as the number of confirmed fatalities stood at 217. Adding poignancy and a touch of the surreal, Tuesday’s magnitude-7.1 quake struck on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands. Just hours earlier, people around Mexico had held earthquake drills to mark the date. One of the most desperate rescue efforts was at a primary and secondary school in southern Mexico City, where a wing of the three-story building collapsed into a massive pancake of concrete slabs. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble, covered in sheets. Volunteer rescue worker Dr. Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble that had been Escuela Enrique Rebsamen. He made it into a classroom...
Post a Comment
Read more