☢️ Axios PM: Last chance for talks

🍻 Happy Friday Jr.! Today's newsletter, edited by Alex Fitzpatrick, is 696 words, a 2½-min. read. Thanks to Sheryl Miller for copy editing.

⚡️ Situational awareness: The 24-foot boat involved in a deadly clash with Cuba's coast guard yesterday was stolen in the Florida Keys and had American citizens aboard, Axios' Marc Caputo scoops.

Today's nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran in Geneva resulted in "significant progress," Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi said this afternoon.

• A senior U.S. official said the talks were "positive," but didn't immediately provide more details, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.

☢️ The meeting was seen by many in the Trump administration as a last chance for diplomacy before President Trump decides whether to launch a war over Iran's nuclear program.

• The talks — between Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — took place over several hours, in a morning and an afternoon session.

🇺🇸 The U.S. side was "disappointed" by Iran's positions during the early session, according to a source familiar.

• If Witkoff and Kushner report back to Trump that there was no breakthrough, a military strike would become more likely.

🇮🇷 During the break, an Iranian official told Al Jazeera that Iran rejected the idea of permanently abandoning uranium enrichment, dismantling its nuclear facilities, and moving its uranium stockpiles abroad.

• Iran has proposed reducing its uranium stockpile to low enrichment levels under international supervision, the official said.

☢️ The U.S. came into the talks willing to show flexibility on Iran's desire to enrich uranium — but only if Tehran could prove there was no path to a bomb.

What's next: Consultations in Washington and Tehran, then technical discussions between nuclear experts in Vienna next week.

• Go deeper.

The New York, Boston, and Portland, Ore., metro areas have the country's safest roadways, Alex Fitzpatrick reports from StreetLight Data's new U.S. Safe Streets Index.

• 🚙 That's based on five key factors among the 100 biggest U.S. metros: vehicle miles traveled, different speeds between vehicles, pedestrian risk, speeding in residential zones, and truck activity.

"Larger metros tend to perform better overall for roadway safety, despite popular misconceptions that big cities are more dangerous," says the transportation analytics firm.

☘️ Zoom in: Boston "is the only metro studied that scores in the top 30 across all five safety factors," per StreetLight's report.

• It cites traffic-calming measures, plus the city's older layout and sometimes snowy weather, which "may help keep speeds low and consistent."

Read the report.

The next era of discovery.

Anthropic is partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission to make Claude and its best engineers available to America's national labs.

The partnership focuses on energy dominance, biological and life sciences, and scientific productivity.

1. 🏡 The average 30-year mortgage rate dipped below 6% today for the first time since 2022, per closely watched Freddie Mac data. Go deeper.
2. 🌎 World Economic Forum leader Børge Brende announced his resignation, the latest casualty of the Epstein fallout rocking business, politics and academia. Go deeper.
3. 🍔 Burger King is launching an AI chatbot, "Patty," to evaluate the friendliness of workers' interactions with customers, The Verge reports.
4. 🏀 The Athletic is hiring a slew of sports reporters formerly of the Washington Post to expand its coverage of D.C. teams. More from Axios' Kerry Flynn.

🏗️ Above: Construction will begin this spring on the final building of the World Trade Center redevelopment — the new global headquarters of American Express, and a new landmark on the lower Manhattan skyline.

• The groundbreaking for 2 World Trade Center comes 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks destroyed the site. The 1,226-foot-tall building, with 55 office floors, is due for completion in 2031.
• American Express will be the sole occupant of the 10,000-person tower.

Go deeper ... More images.

Harvard University materials scientist Adel Djellouli appears to have cracked basketball's oldest mystery: What exactly causes that iconic squeak-squeak-squeak sound of sneakers on a court?

• Djellouli and colleagues slid a sneaker against a smooth glass plate over and over, AP reports.
• 🎤 Researchers recorded the squeaks with a microphone and filmed the whole thing with a high-speed camera to see what was happening under the shoe.

⛹️‍♂️ As the shoe works hard to keep its grip, tiny sections of the sole change shape as they momentarily lose, then regain, contact with the floor thousands of times per second — at a frequency that matches the pitch of the loud squeak we hear.

• Go deeper.

What the data shows.

AI helps most with the hardest work, not the simplest. Anthropic analyzed 2 million conversations and found Claude's biggest impact is on complex, college-level tasks. The Economic Index tracks adoption across every state and occupation.

See how your state is using AI.

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