US President Donald Trump said he was sending a delegation to Pakistan on Monday for negotiations with Iran, while renewing his threats to destroy the country’s vital infrastructure if it didn’t agree to a deal.

“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” the American leader declared on Sunday in a post on his Truth Social account, saying that without a deal, Washington was “going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran”.

Iran and the United States, along with Israel, are three days away from the end of a two-week ceasefire that halted the Middle East war started by surprise US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28.

There has so far been only a single, 21-hour negotiating session held in Islamabad on April 11 that ended inconclusively, though groundwork for fresh talks continued afterwards.

“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it,” Trump said in his post.

No date has yet been announced for a second round of talks, and Iran’s speaker of parliament and senior negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf insisted on Saturday night that the two sides were “still far from the final discussion”.

Trump justified the war as an attempt to stop Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons — an ambition it has always denied — and the atomic issue remains a key sticking point in negotiations.

Iran and the US had already been discussing Tehran’s nuclear programme in Oman-mediated talks when Washington launched the war, which has now added a fresh point of contention — the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for oil and gas shipments that Iran has ordered closed.

Police personnel keep watch at a closed road leading to the Serena Hotel in the Red Zone area of Islamabad on April 19, 2026.

A second round of talks between the United States and Iran is expected in Islamabad this coming week.
In Islamabad, security had been visibly stepped up on Sunday ahead of the expected talks.

Authorities announced road closures and traffic restrictions across the city, as well as in neighbouring Rawalpindi.

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AFP journalists saw armed guards and checkpoints near Islamabad’s most secure hotels — the Marriott and the Serena.

“Citizens are earnestly requested to cooperate with the security agencies,” a city official posted on X.

The US president said his negotiators, whom he didn’t name, would arrive in the Pakistani capital on Monday evening.

The previous delegation was led by Vice President JD Vance and included Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who led the aborted pre-war talks.

A major sticking point of negotiations has been Iran’s stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium.

Trump said on Friday that Iran had agreed to hand over its roughly 440 kilogrammes of enriched uranium. “We’re going to get it by going in with Iran, with lots of excavators,” he said.

But Iran’s foreign ministry has said the stockpile, thought to be buried deep under rubble from US bombing in last June’s 12-day war, was “not going to be transferred anywhere”, and surrendering it “to the US has never been raised in negotiations”.

On Sunday, President Masoud Pezeshkian questioned why Iran should give up its “legal right” to a nuclear programme.



– Hormuz closed again –

An oil tanker of CPC Corporation is docked at Keelung Port on March 11, 2026. Oil prices held around 100 USD on March 13, and most equity markets dropped after Iran’s leader called for the blocking of the crucial Strait of Hormuz (Photo by I-Hwa Cheng / AFP)
Tehran moved to close off the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas travel in peacetime, at the start of the war, hammering the global economy and roiling markets.

Having failed to force it open again, Trump countered with a US naval blockade on Iranian ports in an attempt to cut off Tehran’s oil revenues.

Iran briefly reopened the strait on Friday in recognition of an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire in Lebanon, but closed it again the following day in response to the US maintaining its blockade.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that any attempt to pass through the strait without permission “will be considered cooperation with the enemy, and the offending vessel will be targeted”.

“If America does not lift the blockade, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz will definitely be limited,” Ghalibaf said.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei on Sunday said the blockade was “a violation” of the ceasefire and illegal collective punishment of the Iranian people.

A handful of oil and gas tankers had crossed the strait early on Saturday during the brief reopening, but by early Sunday morning, tracking data showed the waterway empty of shipping.

The afternoon before, a trio of incidents demonstrated the dangers of any attempted crossing.

A UK maritime security agency said the Revolutionary Guards fired at one tanker, while security intelligence firm Vanguard Tech reported the force had threatened to “destroy” an empty cruise ship that was fleeing the Gulf.

In the third incident, the UK agency said it received a report of a vessel “being hit by an unknown projectile, which caused damage” to shipping containers but no fire.

Trump said of the incidents: “That wasn’t nice, was it?”

Pope Leo XIV said Saturday he regretted remarks he made were interpreted as a response to criticism from President Donald Trump, insisting he had no interest in debating the US leader.

An example was a speech about “tyrants” ransacking the world that he delivered in Cameroon on Thursday, on the second leg of a tour of Africa, Leo told journalists as he travelled to Angola.

The remarks had been written well before Trump’s “comment on myself and on the message of peace that I am promoting,” he said.

“And yet it was perceived as if I were trying to start a new debate with the president, which doesn’t interest me at all,” Leo said.

“Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said,” he said.

Leo had blasted “tyrants” ransacking the world on Thursday while on a high-security visit to Cameroon’s northwestern city of Bamenda, the epicentre of a nearly decade-long English-speaking separatist insurgency that has killed thousands.

The remarks were interpreted by the US media in particular as a reference to Trump.

But they were written well before Trump’s criticisms, Leo said, adding “there’s been a certain narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects”.

Trump had said on April 12 he was “not a big fan of Pope Leo”, and accused him of “toying with a country (Iran) that wants a nuclear weapon”.

He later doubled down on his comments to reporters with a post on Truth Social, saying: “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”

“Pope Leo is weak on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the US leader said.

AFP

Pope Leo XIV on Friday warned against the use of AI to fan “polarisation, conflict, fear and violence” and criticised the “environmental devastation” caused by the extraction of rare earths to fuel the digital boom.

The challenge posed by these systems is greater than it appears: it is not just about the use of new technologies, but about the gradual replacement of reality by its simulation,” he said in a speech at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaounde, Cameroon.”In this way, polarisation, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”

It marks the pontiff’s latest outspoken intervention on a landmark 11-day tour of Africa that has seen him abandon his previous restraint to deliver impassioned pleas for world peace — and tussle with fellow American Donald Trump, after the US president lashed out at him for calling for an end to the war in the Middle East.

While Leo has called for caution on AI several times since his election in May 2025, his latest warning about the technology comes as the US president faces increasing scrutiny over his use of AI.

After the pope criticised the US-Israeli war with Iran, Trump on Sunday posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a saint with a glowing halo. The image was taken down on Monday.

Leo conceded that “Christians, and especially young African Catholics, must not be afraid of new things”.

But the continent “also knows the darker side of the environmental and social devastation caused by the relentless pursuit of raw materials and rare earths”, he added.

The AI boom is largely reliant on the extraction of cobalt needed to run energy-hungry data servers, with Africa often bearing the environmental, social and human cost of mining.

Notably, competition for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s rich veins of cobalt, copper, lithium and coltan has fuelled a spiral of violence in the mineral-rich east that has lasted three decades.

According to the US Geological Survey, the country supplied more than three-quarters of the world’s cobalt production in 2024.

“Africa needs to be freed from the scourge of corruption,” Leo said, taking aim at a graft-riddled mining industry where foreign powers — China foremost among them — reap the riches of the continent’s wealth while the local populations suffer.