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Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and the transition, Mr. Biden insisted he would lift sanctions imposed by President Donald J. Trump only if Iran returned to the limits on nuclear production that it observed until 2019.

Under the original 2015 deal, Iran shipped 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country and agreed to sharp limits on new production that would essentially assure it would take it a year or more to produce enough material for a single weapon. (It would take even longer to build a weapon.) In return, world powers lifted international sanctions that had choked the Iranian economy.

The New Washington

Feb. 19, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ET

But over the objections of his first secretary of state and his first defense secretary both of whom were fired Mr. Trump restored American sanctions in 2018, arguing that the deal was flawed and that economic penalties would eventually break the government in Tehran, or force it into a new agreement. His move infuriated the other nations that brokered the accord with Iran after years of stop-and-start negotiations.

Over the past year, Iran has unabashedly compiled and enriched nuclear fuel beyond the limits negotiated in the 2015 agreement. Its leaders have accused the United States of being the first to violate its terms and vowed to come back into compliance only after America reversed course and allowed it to sell oil and conduct banking operations around the world.

Publicly, the Iranian foreign minister, Mr. Zarif, has cast doubt that Tehran will agree to talks before the American sanctions are lifted. In a tweet on Thursday, he played down Irans repeated violations of the accord as mere remedial measures.

A senior Biden administration official said that closing that gap would be a painstaking process.

The offer comes days before a Sunday deadline when Iran has said it will bar international inspectors from visiting undeclared nuclear facilities and conducting unannounced inspections of nuclear sites, unless the United States lifts sanctions reimposed by the Trump administration. The threat would not bar inspectors from declared nuclear-related facilities that are monitored on a regular basis. Still, the ability to inspect anywhere, on demand, by the International Atomic Energy Agency, is mandated by the nuclear deal.

And it is crucial to the international communitys confidence that Iran is not rapidly reconstituting its ability to make a weapon. There has been growing circumstantial evidence, much of it provided by Israeli intelligence, that the country never fully disclosed the sites involved in its program, dating back more than two decades.

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Biden Administration Formally Offers to Restart Nuclear Talks With Iran - The New York Times

Saudi and Emirati officials, for their part, were silent on Friday. Watching the Biden administrations outreach to Tehran with resignation, the two Gulf States which were outraged at being excluded from the last negotiations can only hope that the United States will keep its promises to consider Gulf interests in the talks, analysts said.

We just have to trust the new administration, said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist. We dont have any option. They really are determined to reach out to Iran, so theres no way that anybody could stop them.

But he acknowledged there could be something to gain, saying, If the end result is less confrontation with Iran, a less aggressive Iran, a less expansionist Iran, its a dream of a sort.

The Israeli governments reticence reflects a less combative approach to the Biden administrations policymaking than with President Barack Obamas, at least initially, said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence.

Practically, they will not confront the Biden administration directly, he said. They will wait a little bit to see whether the Iranians are reacting and how the negotiations develop.

But behind the scenes, Israel is already lobbying the United States for an agreement that is much tougher on Iran. The Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, and a team of experts will soon travel to Washington to brief senior American officials about what they see as the threats still posed by Iran, hoping to persuade the United States to hold out for harsher restrictions on Iran in any deal, two senior Israeli officials said.

Israeli intelligence suggests that Iran has blatantly violated the terms of the original nuclear deal and is still taking steps to develop a nuclear warhead, the officials said, claims that Iran denies.

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In Israel and the Gulf, Reaction to U.S. Push for Iran Talks Is Muted but Wary - The New York Times

The day after President Biden was inaugurated, Baghdad was hit by two suicide bombers who, in macabre fashion, killed at least 32 people and wounded at least 100. The attack was a stark reminder that the Iraq theater is still a critical one for combatting ISIS and preventing it from mounting a resurgence. With this in mind, U.S.-Iraq ties are worth salvaging after their deterioration over the past four years. ISIS is strongly positioned to carry out more routine mass-casualty attacks. While the January bombing was its first major terrorist attack in Baghdad in over three years, ISIS carries out near-daily attacks in the rest of the country and could develop a momentum similar to that which preceded its declaration of a caliphate in 2014.

There are two underlying challenges that makes ISIS capable of carnage and launching a resurgence: Iraqs desperate need for an economic revival and the threat from Shiite militia groups. Addressing both requires that Washington adopt a set of guiding principles for its engagement with Iraq an approach premised on the fact that Iraqs economic crisis and the threat from Iran-aligned Shiite militia groups are two sides of the same coin.

Iraqs economic crisis will produce untold poverty levels if it is not addressed. The COVID-19 pandemic, together with the decline in oil prices, has added to the urgency of stabilizing the precarious security environment and reviving the economy. According to the World Bank, 12 million Iraqis could soon become vulnerable to poverty. Iraq has a budget shortfall of around $4.5 billion monthly and debt in excess of $80 billion. At least 700,000 Iraqis enter the job market every year but struggle to find jobs.

In this environment of destitution and lawlessness, the influence of Iran-aligned militias will increase; their reach and strength within Iraqi society is underscored by a complex web of inter-personal and inter-organizational links that make their elimination difficult, if not impossible. Central to their predominance is their capacity to exploit socio-economic conditions to swell their ranks with the impoverished and reinforce their patronage networks. When combined with their ongoing and systemic violence against political rivals and the civilian population, this allows them to impose a stranglehold over Iraqs institutions.

On the surface, the Baghdad government has effectively outsourced security to some of these groups in the territories that were previously occupied by ISIS, but in reality the government is too weak to confront them and impose its authority in strategically important territories. The militias are disdained by the local population as a result of their human rights abuses and ongoing sectarian crimes. This allows ISIS to exploit the resulting grievances and cracks in the security environment, and potentially mount a resurgence.

These militia groups also lack the professionalism and discipline to contain ISIS their primary focus is not to secure ISIS defeat, but to secure broader political and territorial objectives, in direct coordination with Iran. Mondays rocket attack on Erbil by Iran-aligned groups shows that they will continue undermining the coalitions efforts to secure the enduring defeat of ISIS. In addition to consolidating their control over illicit economies, the militia groups are augmenting their bastions in Iraqs north. From places like Sinjar, the militias and Iran can pursue cross-border objectives in Syria.

Under President Trump, U.S.-Iraq relations were volatile. While the Biden team in charge of the Iraq portfolio should not emulate the Trump administrations stance regarding Iran and its proxies, it should not assume either that long-term security-sector reform efforts will actually rein in these actors. Biden should focus on empowering Iraqi actors who can hold Iran-aligned groups to account, and who can constrain their ability to shape Iraqs political, economic, and security environment. In the process, Washington can enable economic reforms that will reduce those groups stranglehold over the state.

While there was some hope that security sector reform would result in the integration of Iran-aligned militias into the armed forces, as well as their demobilization and disarmament, this has proven to be a costly miscalculation for which the average Iraqi is paying the price. Through their control of the Popular Mobilization Force (the 100,000-strong umbrella militia organization led and dominated by Irans proxies, which was integrated into the state in 2016), the interior ministry, and an array of other militias, Iran-aligned groups exert undue influence over the Iraqi state. They coerce or kill champions of reform and good governance such as Hisham al-Hashimi and Riham Yaqoob.

These groups have also assassinated government officials and are responsible for killing at least 700 protesters and wounding thousands. Yes, Iraq has an array of armed groups as a consequence of its recent history and its pre-war legacies but it is this particular group of militias that negotiates with its rivals through systemic violence, including assassinations, rocket attacks, and improvised explosive device attacks on coalition personnel. And it is this group of militias that, at Irans bidding, attacks prospective and much-needed investors from the Gulf to prevent Iraq from developing its relations with the Arab world and saving its economy in the process.

The Biden administration has an opportunity to establish new guiding principles for its relations with Iraq. It should focus on possible near- and medium-term wins.

Washington should view two issues as interconnected: its economic support for Iraq and the threat that the Baghdad government faces from Iran-backed militia groups. The resources and energy it spends on Iraqs institutions must no longer indirectly empower the actors that use violence to shape the direction of the political environment. That also means U.S. military support which is designed to strengthen the Baghdad government so that it can undertake the economic regeneration of the country free from the threat of violence must not become an enabler of militia violence. For example, U.S. Abrams tanks and other equipment supplied to Baghdad in the past are now in the hands of Irans deadliest and most powerful partners. Iraqs protesters, civil society, and wider population pay the price.

Washingtons counterterrorism strategy, in coordination with Baghdad, should seek to address Iran-backed militia atrocities in addition to the threat of ISIS. The former ultimately enables the latter. As part of this, Washington should pressure Baghdad to stop expanding the purse that allows militia groups to grow. Iraqs federal budget proposal for 2021 has been criticized. As my Brookings colleague Marsin Alshamarys analysis shows, it proposes to increase the budget allocation for the Ministry of Defense by 9.9%, the Ministry of Interior by 9.7%, the Counter Terrorism Force by 10.1%, and the Popular Mobilization Forces by a staggering 45.7% from the previous budget of 2019.

Irans allies and enablers in Baghdad have sowed confusion and distorted their own complicity in human rights atrocities by adding more militia groups to their growing network of partners. They blame these so-called rogue groups for human rights violations, rocket attacks, attacks on protesters, and assassinations. The Biden administration should not fall for this sophisticated effort to create a degree of plausible deniability that allows them to escape culpability.

Washington should also help the Iraqi security forces insulate reformists from the threat of intimidation and assassination, to include politicians and activists. As a start, the U.S. should work with Iraqi civil society to improve its capacity to expose the nexus between Irans proxies and their front groups, a key part of the accountability process. This could empower (and pressure) Kadhimi to take more action on Irans proxy network in Iraq, and pressure the judiciary to act.

The reason its so important to promote broad reform in Iraq is because, as I wrote last year, economic revival will diminish the resources and manpower that Iran-aligned groups depend on. Iraq must work to erode the patronage networks that allow them to exploit the impoverished, and improve accountability and transparency to constrain their ability to carry out atrocities with impunity. The U.S. should support the pillars of economic regeneration including the prime ministers office, the finance ministry, and the Trade Bank of Iraq, among others to enhance Iraqi efforts vis--vis strategic partnerships with the Gulf, financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the establishment of a modern banking infrastructure in the country.

Iran-aligned militias are a major political force as much as they are a military one. Prime Minister Kadhimi should avoid making rivals out of political actors that also want to contain these groups. U.S. engagement with Iraq should consequently focus on mediation between actors that have strong ties to Washington. Efforts to ensure these groups are unified on critical policy issues like revenue-sharing agreements, budget allocations, and the disputed territories should be central to U.S. engagement with Iraq. Moreover, Washington should not be averse to the idea of making support to the Kadhimi government conditional on its ability to reconcile at least some of its differences with U.S. aligned groups. Otherwise, short-term support for Iraq risks becoming either sunk costs, or long-term gains for Iran-aligned groups.

Iraqs struggle with its Iran-aligned militia groups is very multifaceted, and no one policy solution out of Baghdad or Washington will be enough on its own. But given the way these groups exploit Iraqs dire economic situation, in particular, economic reform from within and support from without should be considered a key part of the overall response to these nefarious armed actors.

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To save Iraq from economic collapse and fight ISIS, contain Irans proxies - Brookings Institution

Rotterdam-based MVRDV has announced that renovation work has started at the Pyramid of Tirana, an adaptive reuse project in Albanias capital city that will see a monument-museum erected in honor of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist dictator who ruled over the mountainous Balkan nation with a ferocious grip for over four decades, transformed into what MVRDV has called a new hub for Tiranas cultural life and a carrier for the new generation.

Completed in 1988 in the heart of Tirana just three years after Hoxhas death, the Brutalist structure first served as a decidedly eccentric landmark museum honoring Hoxha that was co-designed by his architect daughter, Pranvera Hoxha, and her husband, Klement Kolaneci, along with others.

The tenure of the so-called Enver Hoxha Museum, however, was relatively short-lived as a pyramidal shrine (colloquially referred to as the Enver Hoxha Mausoleum) was shuttered shortly after the fall of communism in Albania in 1991. The 127,000-square-foot monument was then rebranded as the Pyramid of Tirana and in subsequent years has served an eclectic range of proposes, none of them having much permanence: A conference venue, a nightclub, a base for NATO during the 1999 Kosovo War, a media broadcasting center, and a filming location for at least one direct-to-video horror remake. Most recently, the Pyramid, having fallen into a state of disrepair, has served as an unsanctioned (and somewhat perilous) hangout spot for Albanian youths, who have taken it upon themselves to cover the hulking, marble tile-clad structure in graffiti and often climb it at night and thennot without riskslide down its slopes, according to an MVRDV press release.

Climbing up and then sliding down the building seems to have been something of a time-honored tradition for the youth of Tirana. As the current mayor of the city, Erion Veliaj, explained to The Guardian last year in an article detailing the reuse of Hoxha-era structures and sites, he certainly partook in this activity in his younger years: I remember our butts would catch fire sliding down. We all used to have the same corduroy pants and you could see them losing their corduroy ribbing, he said. He also relayed to The Guardian that he personally specified that the reimagined Pyramid should remain climbable. The building represents our transition, he added. Its a metaphorical display of what weve gone through.

Proposed demolish-and-replace schemes have come and gone over the years but none have stuck due largely to pushback from the residents of Tirana, who prefer that the Pyramid remain standing as a reminder, however painful, of the oppressive, isolationist Hoxha regime. (Hoxhas widow, Nexhmije Hoxha, died last year at the age of 99. She remained an unapologetic defender of her late husband and his policies, which included banning all religion and private property and forbidding travel outside of Albanias borders, until her death.)

In 2017, a plan to revitalize and repurpose the structure was formalized, leading to the now-underway MVRDV-lead transformation, a project co-financed by the Albanian central government and the municipality of Tirana with assistance from the Albanian-American Development Foundation. The reborn structures main tenant will be the nonprofit organization TUMO Tirana, which will establish a multifaceted creative technology learning hub and cultural center at the Pyramid and provide free educational courses in software, film, music, robotics, and animation to local teenagers.

The overhaul of the Pyramid, its interior currently hermetically sealed and inaccessible per MVRDV, will be a dramatic one although the buildings concrete shell will be preserved. A multitude of modular boxes containing individual programmatic spaces will be placed inside, upon, and around the existing structure to create a dynamic village composed of classrooms, cafes, and studios according to the firm. The dark and cavernous main interior space will be opened up and converted into a light-filled atrium.

The sloping concrete beams will be, as mentioned, left intact and converted into external staircases so that the public can continue, as specified by Veliaj, to scaleand slide down, on one single beamthe structure, albeit in a safer and more organized fashion. As noted by MVRDV, the external staircases help to preserve the appropriating [of the former dictatorial monument] that began with the citizens of Tirana while transforming the stair-clad building into a venue for open-air events and touristic sightseeing opportunities. On the landscaping front, plans to cloak the largely vegetation-free site with trees and greenery will further boost its appeal as a place for the public to congregate.

Said Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV, in a statement:

Working on a brutalist monument like the Pyramid is a dream. It is striking and interesting to see how the country struggled with the future of the building, which on one hand is a controversial chapter in the countrys history, and on the other hand has already been partly reclaimed by the residents of Tirana. I immediately saw its potential, and that it should be possible to make it even more of a peoples monument instead of demolishing it. The challenging part is to create a new relationship between the building and its surroundings. I am confident our design establishes this. I am looking forward to seeing young people and for the first time older people climbing the steps to the rooftop!

The transformation of the Pyramid of Tiranaa project that shows how a building can be made suitable for a new era, while at the same time preserving its complex history, and demonstrates that historic brutalist buildings are ideal for reuse per MVRDVseems to have been warmly received by residents of the city, many of whom have rallied against plans to raze, instead of repurposing, other decrepit but culturally significant structures in the capital. Case in point: Last Mays demolition of the historic National Theatre of Albania (Teatri Kombtar) sparked heatedand at times violentconfrontations between protestors and police and lead to mass arrests. The iconic theater, erected in 1939 during the Italian occupation of Albania, will be replaced with a bowtie-shaped, Bjarke Ingels Group-designed cultural center.

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Work kicks off at MVRDV's transformation of a communist relic into a new cultural hub for Tirana, Albania - The Architect's Newspaper

YOUR Honour, there are a few things I wish to say. For if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace, and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.

Quite candidly, Your Honour, I say these things not with any idea that what I say will influence your sentence of me. For even with all the powers Your Honour holds, how can you decide to mete out justice for the only act to which I proudly plead guilty, and for one, moreover by which your own prior rulings constitute no crime that of being a member and officer of the Communist Party of the United States?

Will you measure, for example, as worthy of one years sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a communist, I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class.

A year for another vital communist belief, that the bestial Korean War is an unjust war?Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations can be achieved and peace won if struggled for?

Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation of man by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial resources of the nation be harnessed for the wellbeing of the people?

Still another years sentence for my belief that the denial of the exercise of free speech and thought to communists only precedes, as history confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans?

These were the opening words of Claudia Joness statement to the court in New York in February 1953.

As a member of the political committee of the Communist Party, she, alongside 10 other leading communists, were being tried in a courtdescribed at the time as the thought control trial held under the infamous provisions of the fascist-like Smith Act before a rigged jury, with framed up testimony provided by paid stool pigeons and professional informers and in an atmosphere of hysteria.

Several years before, 11 leading communists had been tried under similar circumstances and given severe prison sentences.

This period of McCarthyism saw thousands of communists, trade unionists, black activists and others persecuted and imprisoned by a reactionary US government which preached the threat of communism taking over the country to disguise its attack on democracy and civil rights.

As black and red, Jones was one of the main targets of the repressive state machine which for years had tried to deport her as an alien and immigrant.

Shades here of the present British government which is still actively deporting people who originally arrived here as immigrants.

Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915, had arrived in the US aged just eight and over the years had had been continually denied US citizenship because of her politics.

Now the authorities had her in their sights. She was indicted for an article she had written, entitled Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security on the grounds that this had broken bail conditions she was under.

However, the judge refused to allow the article to be read out in court.

Joness response was outstanding. She said: Introduce a page to show Claudia Jones wrote an article during the indictment period, but you dare not even read a line of it, even to a biased jury, on which sat a lone Negro juror, there by accident, since he was an alternate well through most of the trial. You dare not gentlemen of the prosecution, assert that Negro women can think and speak and write.

She continued to denounce racism and declare her pride in being a communist. She ended her statement with these words.

If out of this struggle history assesses that I and my co-defendants have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small indeed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honoured today in all lands for their contributions to social progress, will, just like the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the United States in that coming day.

Imprisoned anddeported to Britain after the trial, Jones is remembered for many accomplishments, not least of which is her historic statement to the court in February 1953.

Her words then and today, where we are seeing growing tensions between nations, the rise of fascism in many parts of the world and continued oppression of people because of their sex and race as well as class remain valid.

February 21 1915 is also Joness birth date, so the Communist Party of Britains Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Commission plans to celebrate her life with an annual ceremony including an oration beside her grave at Highgate cemetery.

The Communist Party, with broad participation from our friends and allies in the community and abroad, aims to arrange the first commemoration in February 2022 when we all hope the Covid pandemic which has taken so many lives especially from the most vulnerable, the poorest, the oldest and black and Asian people is over.

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The words of Claudia Jones words still resonate today - Morning Star Online