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By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press
MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — Oman mediated indirect talks Friday between Iran and the United States over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, seeking to de-escalate tensions between the nations after Washington bombed Iranian nuclear sites and Tehran launched a bloody crackdown on nationwide protests.
In this photo released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, left, shakes hands with his Omani counterpart Sayyid Badr Albusaidi during their meeting prior to Iran and the U.S. negotiations, in Muscat, Oman, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (Iranian Foreign Ministry via AP)
Oman issued a public statement acknowledging the talks after Associated Press journalists watched Iranian and American officials separately visit a palace on the outskirts of Muscat to speak to the sultanate’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi.
It wasn’t immediately clear if that was the end of the talks for the day. However, the palace stood empty after the convoys left.
The two countries returned Friday to Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, months after rounds of meetings turned to ash following Israel’s launch of a 12-day war against Iran back in June. The U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear sites during that war, likely destroying many of the centrifuges that spun uranium to near weapons-grade purity. Israel’s attacks devastated Iran’s air defenses and targeted its ballistic missile arsenal as well.
U.S. officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio believe Iran’s theocracy is now at its weakest point since its 1979 Islamic Revolution after nationwide protests last month represented the greatest challenge to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule. Khamenei’s forces responded with a crackdown that killed thousands and reportedly saw tens of thousands arrested — and spurred new military threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to target the country.
FILE – White House Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff speaks at an event in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert,File)
With the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and other warships in the region, along with more fighter jets, the U.S. now likely has the military firepower to launch an attack if it wanted. But whether attacks could be enough to force Iran to change its ways — or potentially topple its government — remains far from a sure thing.
Meanwhile, Gulf Arab nations fear an attack could spark a regional war dragging them in as well. That threat is real — already, U.S. forces shot down an Iranian drone near the Lincoln and Iran attempted to stop a U.S.-flagged ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
The palace, near Muscat’s international airport, had been used by Oman in earlier talks between Iran and the U.S. in 2025. AP journalists saw Iranian officials at the palace and later returning to their hotel.
Only after the Iranian vehicles left did another convoy including an SUV flying the American flag enter the palace grounds, where it stayed for about an hour and a half.
After that, Oman’s Foreign Ministry published a statement saying al-Busaidi met separately with Araghchi, then with U.S. Mideast special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Footage later released by the state-run Oman News Agency showed that U.S. Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the American military’s Central Command, also attended the meeting — something unusual that hasn’t happened in previous rounds.
“The consultations focused on preparing the appropriate circumstances for resuming the diplomatic and technical negotiations by ensuring the importance of these negotiations, in light of the parties’ determination to ensure their success in achieving sustainable security and stability,” the Omani announcement said.
Neither the Americans nor the Iranians offered any readout of the meetings.
Details remained sparse even before the talks began. Officials at Oman’s borders on Thursday showed particular concern over anyone carrying cameras into the sultanate before the negotiations.
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On the Iranian side, Araghchi wrote on X that “Iran enters diplomacy with open eyes and a steady memory of the past year.”
“Commitments need to be honored,” he wrote. “Equal standing, mutual respect and mutual interest are not rhetoric — they are a must and the pillars of a durable agreement.”
A top adviser to Khamenei also appeared to offer the theocracy’s support to the 63-year-old career diplomat.
Araghchi “is a skilled, strategic and trustworthy negotiator at the highest levels of decision-making and military intelligence,” Ali Shamkhani wrote on X. “Soldiers of the nation in the armed forces & generals of diplomacy, acting under the order of the Leader, will safeguard the nation’s interests.”
On the U.S. side, the talks led by Witkoff, a 68-year-old billionaire New York real estate mogul and longtime friend to Trump. Traveling with Witkoff on his Mideast trip so far is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who in recent weeks has shared proposals for the Gaza Strip and took part in trilateral talks with Russia and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi earlier on the trip.
The two men had traveled from Abu Dhabi to Qatar on Thursday night for meetings there, the Qatari-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera reported. Qatar, which shares an offshore natural gas field in the Persian Gulf with Iran, also hosts a major U.S. military installation that Iran attacked in the June war.
It remains unclear just what terms Iran will be willing to negotiate at the talks. Tehran has maintained that these talks only will be on its nuclear program. However, Al Jazeera reported that diplomats from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar offered Iran a proposal in which Tehran would halt enrichment for three years, send its highly enriched uranium out of the country and pledge “not initiate the use of ballistic missiles.”
Russia had signaled it would take the uranium, but Shamkhani in an interview earlier this week had said ending the program or shipping out the uranium were nonstarters.
Rubio, America’s top diplomat, said Wednesday that the talks needed to include all those issues.
“I’m not sure you can reach a deal with these guys, but we’re going to try to find out,” he said. ___
The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
By MICHELLE R. SMITH/THE GUARDIAN and ALI SWENSON/Associated Press
Over two days of questioning during his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeated the same answer.
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He said the closely scrutinized 2019 trip he took to Samoa, which came before a devastating measles outbreak, had “nothing to do with vaccines.”
Documents obtained by The Guardian and The Associated Press undermine that testimony. Emails sent by staffers at the U.S. Embassy and the United Nations provide, for the first time, an inside look at how Kennedy’s trip came about and include contemporaneous accounts suggesting his concerns about vaccine safety motivated the visit.
The documents have prompted concerns from at least one U.S. senator that the lawyer and activist now leading America’s health policy lied to Congress over the visit. Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak, which sickened thousands of people and killed 83, mostly children under age 5.
The revelations, which come as measles outbreaks erupt across the U.S., build on previous criticism that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine record makes him unfit to serve as health secretary, a role in which he has worked to radically reshape immunization policy and public perceptions of vaccines.
The newly disclosed documents also reveal previously unknown details of the trip, including that a U.S. Embassy employee helped Kennedy’s team connect with Samoan officials. Kennedy, then running his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, did not publicly discuss the trip at the time, but he has since said his “purpose” for going there was not related to vaccines and “I ended up having conversations with people, some of whom I never intended to meet.” Besides meeting with anti-vaccine activists, Kennedy met with Samoan officials, including the health minister at the time, who told NBC News that Kennedy shared his view that vaccines were not safe. Kennedy has said he went there to introduce a medical data system.
The U.S. State Department turned over the emails — many of which are heavily redacted — as a result of an open records lawsuit brought with the assistance of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
These disclosures come at a time when Kennedy, as President Donald Trump’s health secretary, has used his power and enormous public influence to overhaul federal immunization guidance and raise suspicion about the safety and importance of vaccines, including the measles vaccine. Meanwhile, measles outbreaks in multiple U.S. states have rolled back decades of success in eliminating the highly contagious disease, putting the country on the verge of losing its elimination status. The latest figures show more than 875 people in South Carolina have been infected.
An email obtained by The Guardian and The Associated regarding a trip to Samoa in 2019 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is photographed Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
Kennedy addressed questions about his trip to Samoa during two Senate confirmation hearings for his appointment as health secretary.
“My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines,” he said under questioning by Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts in his Jan. 30, 2025, hearing.
“Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines as you told my colleagues in Senate Finance yesterday?” Markey asked later.
“Nothing to do with vaccines,” Kennedy replied.
One of the senators who questioned Kennedy about Samoa during his confirmation hearings, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, responded to the records by saying, “Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda is directly responsible for the deaths of innocent children.”
“Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America,” Wyden said in an email. “He and his allies will be held responsible.”
Taylor Harvey, a spokesman for Wyden and other Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, said it is a crime to make a false statement to Congress and “casual, false denials to Congress will not be swept under the rug.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions sent by email and text message.
Kennedy has said his visit did not influence people’s decisions on whether to get themselves or their children immunized.
“I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate,” he told the 2023 documentary “Shot in the Arm.” “I didn’t, you know, go there for any reason to do with that.”
An email obtained by The Guardian and The Associated regarding a trip to Samoa in 2019 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is photographed Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
Anti-vaccine activists in the United States became interested in Samoa in July 2018, when two babies died after being injected with a tainted measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine that had been improperly prepared. The government halted the vaccine program for 10 months, until the following April. Vaccination rates plummeted.
The records show that during the time when no vaccines were being administered, Kennedy’s group, Children’s Health Defense, was trying to connect Kennedy with Samoa’s prime minister. A January 2019 email from the group’s then-president, Lyn Redwood, to Samoan activist Edwin Tamasese asked him to “please share this letter with the Honorable Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi for Robert Kennedy, Jr.”
About two months later, Tamasese wrote back to Redwood, with a cc: to Kennedy and others.
“Hope all is well, organizing logistics with the PMs office and wanted to confirm how many people are coming? Also just wanted to confirm costs etc for the visit and how this will be handled,” he wrote.
Tamasese immediately forwarded the chain of messages to the personal and government email accounts of Benjamin Harding, at the time an employee of the U.S. Embassy in Apia, Samoa.
“just sent this. expecting an answer tomorrow as I think it is Sunday there. your letter looks good,” Tamasese told Harding.
While the U.S. Embassy in the past has acknowledged that an unnamed staffer attended an event with Kennedy and anti-vaccine activists while he was in Samoa, the records show that Harding wasn’t a passive attendee: He helped arrange Kennedy’s visit and connected Kennedy’s delegation with Samoan government officials.
In a May 23, 2019, email to Harding’s personal email address, a staffer for the Samoan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade wrote: “Hi Benj, Currently awaiting the official bio-notes for Mr Kennedy and Dr Graven to convey to the Hon. Prime Minister and Hon. Minister of Health for their reference. Please note, that this needs to be sent with our official letter when requesting an appointment.”
Harding forwarded the ministry’s request to Dr. Michael Graven, then the chief information officer at Children’s Health Defense.
Harding did not respond to messages seeking comment sent to several listed email addresses, social media accounts, a phone number listed to his parents and a general mailbox at a company he lists as a current workplace on his LinkedIn profile.
Embassy staffers got a tip about Harding’s involvement in the trip from Sheldon Yett, then the representative for Pacific island countries at UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.
“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” Yett wrote in a May 22, 2019, email to an embassy staffer based in New Zealand. “The staff member in question seems to have had a role in facilitating this.”
Two days later, a top embassy staff member in Apia wrote to Scott Brown, then the Republican U.S. president’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, alerting him to Kennedy’s trip and Harding’s involvement.
“The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view),” the embassy official, Antone Greubel, wrote. “It turns out our very own Benjamin Harding played some role in a personal capacity to bring him here.” Greubel wrote that he told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement with this travel,” though the rest of the sentence is redacted.
Yett did not respond to questions, though he said in an email, “that was a very grim time in Samoa.”
Brown, who is running for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, declined to comment. Greubel referred questions to a press office at the State Department. A State Department spokesperson would not answer questions about the records, saying that as a general practice they do not comment on personnel matters.
Harding left the embassy in July 2020, though he remains in Samoa, according to his LinkedIn account.
Kennedy ultimately visited in June 2019. While there, he and his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, were photographed greeting the prime minister during an Independence Day celebration. He also met with government health officials as well as a group of figures who have cast doubt on vaccines, including Tamasese.
The Guardian and the AP could find no record of Kennedy publicly discussing the purpose of his trip until after measles struck. In 2021, he wrote that he went there to discuss “the introduction of a medical informatics system” to track drug safety. He said Samoan officials “were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the national respite from vaccines.”
Since then, he has said his reason for going to Samoa was not related to vaccines.
Redwood, the former Children’s Health Defense president who made early outreach to Samoa, is now an employee at HHS, reportedly working on vaccine safety.
During the measles outbreak, Kennedy wrote a four-page letter to Samoa’s prime minister suggesting without evidence that the measles infections were due to a defective vaccine and floating other unfounded theories.
This story was jointly reported and published by The Guardian and The Associated Press.
By MUNIR AHMED, Associated Press
ISLAMABAD (AP) — A massive bombing ripped through a Shiite mosque on the outskirts of Pakistan ‘s capital during Friday prayers, killing 31 people and wounding at least 169 others, according to officials. Police said they were investigating whether the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.
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There were fears the death toll from the bombing at the sprawling Islamabad mosque of Khadija Al-Kubra could climb even higher as some of the wounded were reported to be in critical condition. Television footage and social media images showed police and residents transporting the injured to nearby hospitals.
Rescuers and wounded described a harrowing scene, with bodies and wounded lying on the carpeted floor of the mosque.
Hussain Shah said he was praying in the mosque courtyard when a sudden, loud explosion occurred. “I immediately thought that some big attack has happened,” he said.
He then went into the mosque to utter chaos — many of the wounded were screaming and crying out for help. Shah said he counted around 30 bodies inside the mosque, while the number of wounded appeared to be significantly higher.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the explosion, but suspicion is likely to fall on militants such as the Pakistani Taliban or the Islamic State group, which has been blamed for previous attacks on Shiite worshippers, a minority in the country. Militants often target security forces and civilians across Pakistan.
Though attacks are not so frequent in Islamabad, Pakistan has seen a surge in militant violence in recent months, largely blamed on Baloch separatist groups and the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which is a separate group, but allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban. A regional affiliate of the Islamic State group has also been active in the country.
Shortly after the explosion was first reported with a lower number of casualties, Islamabad Deputy Commissioner Irfan Memon gave the latest, much higher casualty tolls.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attack in separate statements and extended condolences to the families of those killed. They instructed that all possible medical assistance be provided for those wounded.
People comfort a man, center, mourning over the death of his relative, close to the site of a bomb explosion at a Shiite mosque, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)
“Targeting innocent civilians is a crime against humanity,” Zardari said. “The nation stands with the affected families in this difficult time.”
Sharif said he has ordered a full investigation. “Those who are responsible must be identified and punished,” he said.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi also condemned the attack, and asked authorities to ensure the provision of best medical care to the wounded.
Friday’s attack occurred as Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who is on an official two-day visit, was attending an event with Sharif. The event in Islamabad was several miles away from the site of the explosion.
A top Shiite leader, Raja Nasir, expressed deep sorrow over the attack at Khadija Al-Kubra.
“Such a terrorist act in the federal capital is not only a serious failure in protecting human lives but also raises significant questions about the performance of the authorities and law enforcement agencies,” he said and asked for people to give blood as the hospitals in Islamabad were in urgent need for blood supplies for the wounded.
The last deadliest attack in Islamabad was in 2008, when a suicide bombing targeted the Marriott Hotel in the capital, killing 63 people and wounding over 250 others. In November, a suicide bomber had struck outside a court in Islamabad, killing 12 people.
The latest attack comes nearly a week after the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army carried out multiple attacks in insurgency-hit southwestern Balochistan province, killing about 50 people.
Security forces responding to those attacks also killed more than 200 “terrorists,” according to the military.
Associated Press writers Babar Dogar in Lahore and Asim Tanveer in Multan, Pakistan, contributed to this story.