“After a week of acerbic fencing between Tehran and Brussels, tempers appear to have been assuaged for the time being by an hour-long Monday night phone call between the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton and the chief Iranian negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

In the course of that conversation Jalili dropped his insistence on a technical meeting before Moscow, which Ashton’s office had opposed on the grounds that there had been countless meetings and conversations about the shape of the table and very little on what was going to be put on the table.”

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