TEHRAN (AP) — Talks between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency will be “technical” and “complicated,” the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Ministry said Monday ahead of a visit by the nuclear watchdog for the first time since Tehran cut ties with the organization last month.
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Relations between the two soured after a 12-day air war was waged by Israel and the U.S in June, which saw key Iranian nuclear facilities bombed. The IAEA board said on June 12 Iran had breached its non-proliferation obligations, a day before Israel’s airstrikes over Iran that sparked the war.
The IAEA did not immediately issue a statement about the visit by the agency’s deputy head, which will not include any planned access to Iranian nuclear sites.
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters there could be a meeting with Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, “but it is a bit soon to predict what the talks will result since these are technical talks, complicated talks.”
Baghaei also criticized the IAEA’s “unique situation” during the June war with Israel.
“Peaceful facilities of a country that was under 24-hour monitoring were the target of strikes and the agency refrained from showing a wise and rational reaction and did not condemn it as it was required,” he said.
Aragchi had previously said that cooperation with the agency, which will now require approval by Iran’s highest security body, the Supreme National Security Council, would be about redefining how both sides cooperate. The decision will likely further limit inspectors’ ability to track Tehran’s program that had been enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels.
Iran has had limited IAEA inspections in the past as a pressure tactic in negotiating with the West, and it is unclear how soon talks between Tehran and Washington for a deal over its nuclear program will resume.
U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA had assessed Iran last had an organized nuclear weapons program in 2003, though Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60% — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.
Police are investigating after they say a 12-year-old accidentally shot himself in his St. Paul residence.
St. Paul Fire Department medics transported him to Regions Hospital in critical condition, said Nikki Muehlhausen, a police spokesperson.
The boy had obtained the gun himself, which his parents didn’t know, and police are investigating how he got it, Muehlhausen said.
Officers found the injured child when they responded shortly before 1:30 a.m. Monday to a report of shots fired at a residence on Congress Street near Stryker Avenue on the West Side.
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Ukrainian drone attack killed one person and wounded two others in a region some 260 miles east of Moscow, a Russian official said Monday, as fighting continued ahead of Friday’s Russia-U.S. summit in which President Vladimir Putin seeks a peace deal to lock in Moscow’s gains.
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Nizhny Novgorod region Gov. Gleb Nikitin said in a statement that drones targeted two “industrial zones” and caused the casualties and unspecified damage.
A Ukrainian official said at least four drones launched by the security services, or SBU, struck a plant in Arzamas city that produced components for Kinzhal hypersonic missiles.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operations, said the Plandin plant produces gyroscopic devices, control systems and on-board computers for the missiles and is an “absolutely legitimate target” because it is part of the Russian military-industrial complex that works for the war against Ukraine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted and destroyed a total of 39 Ukrainian drones overnight and Monday morning over several Russian regions as well as over the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
Friday’s summit, which U.S. President Donald Trump will host in Alaska, sees Putin unwavering on his demands to keep all the Ukrainian territory his forces now occupy and to prevent Kyiv from joining NATO, with the long-term aim of keeping Ukraine under Moscow’s sphere of influence.
Putin believes he has the advantage on the ground as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold back Russian advances along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front. On the front lines, few Ukrainian soldiers believe there’s an end in sight to the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists he will never consent to any Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory nor give up his country’s bid for NATO membership. European leaders have rallied behind Ukraine, saying peace can’t be resolved without Kyiv.
With Europeans and Ukrainians so far not invited to the summit, Germany sought to prepare by inviting Trump, Zelenskyy, the NATO chief and several other European leaders for a virtual meeting on Wednesday.
The German chancellery said the talks would seek additional ways to pressure Russia and prepare for peace negotiations and “related issues of territorial claims and security.”
Steffen Meyer, spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said earlier Monday that the German government “has always emphasized that borders must not be shifted by force” and that Ukraine should decide its own fate “independently and autonomously..
MIAMI (AP) — When Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno visits Colombia this week as part of a three-nation tour of Latin America, it will be something of a homecoming.
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The Ohio senator, who defeated an incumbent last year with the help of Donald Trump’s endorsement and the highest political ad spending in U.S. Senate race history, was born in Bogota and has brothers who are heavyweights in politics and business there.
Moreno has emerged as an interlocutor for conservatives in Latin America seeking to connect with the Trump administration.
In an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the trip, he expressed deep concern about Colombia’s direction under left-wing President Gustavo Petro and suggested that U.S. sanctions, higher tariffs or other retaliatory action might be needed to steer it straight.
The recent criminal conviction of former President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative icon, was an attempt to “silence” the man who saved Colombia from guerrilla violence, Moreno said. Meanwhile, record cocaine production has left the United States less secure — and Colombia vulnerable to being decertified by the White House for failing to cooperate in the war on drugs.
“The purpose of the trip is to understand all the dynamics before any decision is made,” said Moreno, who will meet with both Petro and Uribe, as well as business leaders and local officials. “But there’s nothing that’s taken off the table at this point and there’s nothing that’s directly being contemplated.”
Elected with Trump’s support
Moreno, a luxury car dealer from Cleveland, defeated incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown last year and became Ohio’s senior senator on practically his first day in office after his close friend JD Vance resigned the Senate to become vice president.
In Congress, Moreno has mimicked Trump’s rhetoric to attack top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer as a “miserable old man out of a Dickens novel,” called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and threatened to subpoena California officials over their response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.
On Latin America, he’s been similarly outspoken, slamming Petro on social media as a “socialist dictator” and accusing Mexico of being on the path to becoming a “narco state.”
FILE – Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro attends a military ceremony in Bogota, Colombia, June 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
FILE – Supporters of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe hold cutouts of his face outside the court where he was found guilty of witness tampering and bribery, in Bogota, Colombia, July 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)
Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno raises his right fist during a rally for Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, in Middletown, Ohio, July 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon, File)
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FILE – Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro attends a military ceremony in Bogota, Colombia, June 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
Such comments barely register in blue-collar Ohio, but they’ve garnered attention in Latin America. That despite the fact Moreno hasn’t lived in the region for decades, speaks Spanish with a U.S. accent and doesn’t sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“He’s somebody to watch,” said Michael Shifter, the former president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “He’s one of the most loyal Trump supporters in the senate and given his background in Latin America he could be influential on policy.”
Moreno, 58, starts his first congressional delegation to Latin America on Monday for two days of meetings in Mexico City with officials including President Claudia Sheinbaum. He’ll be accompanied by Terrance Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who is making his first overseas trip since being confirmed by the Senate last month to head the premier federal narcotics agency.
Seeking cooperation with Mexico on fentanyl
Moreno, in the pre-trip interview, said that Sheinbaum has done more to combat the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. than her predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who he described as a “total disaster.” But he said more cooperation is needed, and he’d like to see Mexico allow the DEA to participate in judicial wiretaps like it has for decades in Colombia and allow it to bring back a plane used in bilateral investigations that López Obrador grounded.
“The corruption becomes so pervasive, that if it’s left unchecked, it’s kind of like treating cancer,” said Moreno. “Mexico has to just come to the realization that it does not have the resources to completely wipe out the drug cartels. And it’s only going to be by asking the U.S. for help that we can actually accomplish that.”
Plans to tour the Panama Canal
From Mexico, Moreno heads to Panama, where he’ll tour the Panama Canal with Trump’s new ambassador to the country, Kevin Marino Cabrera.
In March, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate struck a deal that would’ve handed control of two ports on either end of the U.S.-built canal to American investment firm BlackRock Inc. The deal was heralded by Trump, who had threatened to take back the canal to curb Chinese influence.
However, the deal has since drawn scrutiny from antitrust authorities in Beijing and last month the seller said it was seeking to add a strategic partner from mainland China — reportedly state-owned shipping company Cosco — to the deal.
“Cosco you might as well say is the actual communist party,” said Moreno. “There’s no scenario in which Cosco can be part of the Panamanian ports.”
‘We want Colombia to be strong’
On the final leg of the tour in Colombia, Moreno will be joined by another Colombian American senator: Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona. In contrast to Moreno, who was born into privilege and counts among his siblings a former ambassador to the U.S., Gallego and his three sisters were raised by an immigrant single mother on a secretary’s paycheck.
Despite their different upbringings, the two have made common cause in seeking to uphold the tradition of bilateral U.S. support for Colombia, for decades Washington’s staunchest ally in the region. It’s a task made harder by deepening polarization in both countries.
The recent sentencing of Uribe to 12 years of house arrest in a long-running witness tampering case has jolted the nation’s politics with nine months to go before decisive presidential elections. The former president is barred from running but remains a powerful leader, and Moreno said his absence from the campaign trail could alter the playing field.
He also worries that surging cocaine production could once again lead to a “narcotization” of a bilateral relationship that should be about trade, investment and mutual prosperity.
“We want Colombia to be strong, we want Colombia to be healthy, we want Colombia to be prosperous and secure, and I think the people of Colombia want the exact same thing,” he added. “So, the question is, how do we get there?”
