US vice-president writes to top Iranian security official in sign Washington has not abandoned diplomacy
Hopes of averting a major new conflagration between Iran and the US soon after Tuesday’s midterm elections could rest on Iran’s response to a personal letter from the US vice-president, JD Vance, offering to restart diplomacy.
The letter, written after predominantly Qatari mediation, was sent to the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Mohsen Rezaei on Sunday. It requires Tehran to agree to make commitments on its nuclear programme at the start of a process that would lead to the opening of the strait of Hormuz within seven days in return for US sanctions relief.
US vice-president writes to top Iranian security official in sign Washington has not abandoned diplomacy
Hopes of averting a major new conflagration between Iran and the US soon after Tuesday’s midterm elections could rest on Iran’s response to a personal letter from the US vice-president, JD Vance, offering to restart diplomacy.
The letter, written after predominantly Qatari mediation, was sent to the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Mohsen Rezaei on Sunday. It requires Tehran to agree to make commitments on its nuclear programme at the start of a process that would lead to the opening of the strait of Hormuz within seven days in return for US sanctions relief.
When Hoda Afshar was a teenager, coming of age in theocratic and authoritarian Iran in the 1990s, she and her friends were repeatedly arrested and physically punished by the “morality police”, for wearing their hijabs incorrectly in public and for attending underground parties. “They used to put a few of us in small solitary confinement cells together for a night or two, it was very common for my generation to experience that,” she says.
“We are part of the nasl-e sukhteh, or ‘burned generation’; the generation born after the 1979 revolution, who had to pay the price for many of the transformations and changes that happened.”
Despite years of political baggage, the Israeli prime minister outperformed expectations, and his rivals, by playing on Jewish voters’ fears of Arab political power and potential security threats.
Shell has doubled its profits in the last quarter after the Middle East conflict drove up the price of oil and gas and created shortages in the global market.
Shell reported on Thursday morning that it made an adjusted profit of $10.8bn (£8.1bn) in the July-September quarter, up from $5.432bn in the third quarter of 2025. The results beat analyst expectations for a rise to $10.33bn.
Vice President JD Vance is said to have made the outreach in a letter sent last week via Qatari meditators and delivered Sunday to an Iranian official, Gen. Mohsen Rezaei.
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