What happened
The Trump administration has temporarily suspended sanctions on Iran’s oil industry, marking a dramatic shift in US policy as Washington seeks to build momentum in newly opened peace negotiations with Tehran.

The 60-day pause will allow Iran to expand crude exports, sell oil at full market rates and conduct transactions in US dollars, potentially delivering a major boost to the country’s economy.

Who said what
US Vice-President JD Vance described the negotiations so far as a “very good foundation” for a permanent settlement and said Iran had agreed to allow United Nations inspectors to return to its nuclear facilities. However, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei disputed that account, insisting that Tehran had made “no new commitments” on inspections. While there has been some agreement, “progress on nuclear issues is muddy”, said The New York Times.

What next?
Negotiators have 60 days to reach a lasting deal under the terms of last week’s ceasefire agreement. But while “Trump may survive the humiliation of the Iran deal, Netanyahu will not”, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. “What has the Israeli PM’s whirlwind of violence achieved? His closest ally now turning against him – and an emboldened Iran.”

What happened
The French TV presenter at the centre of the row over Belgian international footballer Jeremy Doku’s decision to return home from the World Cup for the birth of his first child has been suspended over her outburst.

L’Equipe’s France Pierron caused international outrage last week when she criticised Doku’s decision, saying a father is “completely useless” at the time of their child’s birth, which she said was a “disgusting moment”.

Who said what
In a statement, L’Equipe apologised and said Pierron’s comments were “very far removed” from its values. The presenter has also apologised, and she did not front her show on Monday.

“The reaction in football – and elsewhere – was united,” said the BBC. England striker Ollie Watkins, who has two children, backed Doku (pictured above), saying: “I think someone labelled it disgusting and I think for a start that’s not a way to label a birth.”

The suggestion that Doku “is some ingrate for daring to place his family above football”, said The Telegraph’s Thom Gibbs, “is a rude and ridiculous over-reach”.

What next?
Doku’s wife Shireen is due to give birth to their son early next month, when Belgium could possibly be competing in the knockout stages of the World Cup.

While the world’s oceans have generally been heating up, one patch of the Atlantic located south of Greenland has been dropping in temperature. Dubbed the “cold blob”, the region’s cooling is likely tied to the growing unsteadiness of one ocean current system due to climate change. And the collapse of that system could lead to disruptions in global weather patterns.

The Atlantic cold blob has cooled by nearly one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1900. The region is also the “only part of the world” that has “cooled significantly since the 19th century, both in the atmosphere and ocean”, said a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists believe that the climate anomaly is happening because of shifts in a network of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The AMOC “works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south”, said CNN. Over time the system has been “weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity”.

Eventually, the current system may “become so weak” that it can “no longer distribute heat around the world”, said USA Today. The collapse of the AMOC has been deemed a climate tipping point after which there will be irreversible ecological damage.

While scientists do not know when the AMOC tipping point will be reached, it could “trigger dramatically cold winters in northern Europe” when it is, said Euronews. An AMOC collapse would also cause sea levels on the east coast of the US to “rise rapidly since the current normally drives water away from the land”, and “storms in the Atlantic would increase in intensity”.