The news at a glance...Americas

Havana

Carter to the rescue? Former President Jimmy Carter met with Cuban leader Raúl Castro as well as with prominent Cuban dissidents in Havana this week on a private visit he said was intended to help thaw relations between the two countries. Relations have been particularly poor since last month, when U.S. contractor Alan Gross, 61, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for providing Internet access to Jewish dissidents. Carter denied widespread speculation that he was in Cuba specifically to negotiate Gross’s release. “We have spoken to some officials about Mr. Gross. But I am not here to take him out of the country,” he said. Carter is the only president or ex-president to visit Cuba since the 1959 communist revolution. On his last visit, in 2002, he criticized the country’s lack of democracy on live television.

Buenos Aires

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Deal with Iran: The Argentine government has told Iran it would drop investigations on past Hezbollah attacks on Israelis and Jews in Buenos Aires in exchange for improved trade, Perfil newspaper reported this week. The paper published a leaked memo, purportedly from Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, in which he states that Argentine officials told him that they wanted to improve economic relations with Iran and were “no longer interested” in solving the attacks, widely believed to be the work of Hezbollah, which Iran supports. The 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy killed 29 people, while the 1994 car bombing of a Jewish cultural center killed 85, making it the country’s worst terrorist attack. Israel demanded an explanation for the published exchange; Argentina had no immediate comment.