Iranian nuclear talks remain tangled

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program headed for double overtime on Wednesday, beset by competing claims and recriminations after differences forced diplomats to abandon their March 31 deadline for the outline of a deal.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry postponed his departure from the talks in the Swiss town of Lausanne for a second time and will remain until at least this morning to continue negotiations, the State Department said.

The latest round of talks hit the weeklong mark today, with diplomats from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany scrambling to reach a fra mework accord with Iran.

“We continue to make progress but have not reached a political understanding,” U. S. spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier sa id negotiators were still facing a “tough struggle,” indicating the talks were not likely to end anytime soon.

“Tonight there will be new proposals, new recommendations. I can’t predict whether that will suff icient to enable an agreement to be reached,” he said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif accused his country’s negotiating partners, particularly the U.S., of having “defective” political will in the talks.

“I’ve always said that an agreement and pressure do not go together, they are mutually exclusive,” he told reporters. “So our friends need to decide whether they want to be with Iran based on respect or whether they want to continue based on pressure.”

The negotiators’ intention is to produce a joint statement outlining general political commitments to resolving concerns about the Iranians’ nuclear program in exchange for relief of economic sanctions against Iran.

But Iran has pushed back not only on the substance of the commitments the sides must make but to the form in which they will make them Iran is demanding that it be a general statement with few specifics.

That is politically unpalatable for the Obama administration , which must convince a hostile Congress that it has made progress in the talks so lawmakers do not enact new sanctions that could destroy the negotiations.