LONDON (AP) — European nations worked to keep diplomatic efforts to curb the Israel-Iran war alive as the two countries traded strikes following the United States’ weekend attack on Iran’s nuclear program, followed by a retaliatory Iranian missile strike Monday on a U.S. base in Qatar.
Calls for Tehran to enter talks with Washington appeared to fall on deaf ears as it reached out to ally Russia for support instead.
The crisis topped the agenda for European Union foreign ministers meeting Monday in Brussels, where diplomats agonized about the potential for Iranian retaliation to spark a wider war and global economic instability.
Iran launched missile attacks Monday on a U.S. military base in Qatar. Qatar condemned the attack on Al Udeid Air Base, and said it successfully intercepted the short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Before that attack, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said "the concerns of retaliation and this war escalating are huge.”
Kallas said any attempt by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global shipping, would be “extremely dangerous and not good for anybody.”
Along with the EU, the “E3” of Britain, France and Germany have led efforts to find a diplomatic solution, holding a tense seven-hour meeting in Geneva on Friday with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. A day after those talks ended with a vague promise to "meet again in the future,” U.S. bombers struck three Iranian nuclear and military sites.
No further E3 talks with Iran are currently planned, a European diplomatic official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.
Still, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy urged Iran to meet the E3 again, and to open negotiations with the United States. Planned U.S.-Iran talks in Oman were scuttled after Israel began attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 13. Iran has since ruled out negotiating while it is under attack.
“Take the off-ramp, dial this thing down and negotiate with the United States immediately and seriously," said Lammy, who spoke to both Araghchi and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Europe had a role to play, but that “a real precondition for a settlement to the conflict is that Iran be ready to negotiate directly with the U.S.”
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told reporters in Brussels that he was proposing a meeting between the United States and Iran in Rome.
It was Moscow that Iran reached out to Monday, though, sending Araghchi to meet President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Putin condemned the United States’ “unprovoked aggression” against Iran and said Russia would help the Iranian people.
Putin said he saw the visit as a chance to explore “how we can get out of today’s situation.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had offered to mediate.
European diplomatic efforts were complicated by a lack of foreknowledge of the Trump administration’s moves. Some countries had no advance notice of the strikes. Britain was notified, but only shortly before bombs fell.
Another hurdle was Trump’s post on social media late Sunday musing about the potential for “regime change” in Iran, despite U.S. officials’ insistence that Washington is not seeking to change the government in Tehran.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stressed Monday that “we reject all attempts to organize a change of regime by force.”
“It would be illusory and dangerous to think that such a change can be provoked through force and bombs,” he said.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, and U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Tehran is not actively pursuing a bomb. However, Trump and Israeli leaders have argued that Iran could quickly assemble a nuclear weapon, making it an imminent threat.
The U.S. strikes have brought mixed emotions in European capitals. Amid alarm at the potential for a wider war and calls for de-escalation, some American allies expressed relief that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back.
“We can’t pretend that the prevention of Iran getting nuclear weapons isn’t a good thing for this country. But we’re prioritizing diplomacy as the way forward,” said Tom Wells, a spokesman for British leader Starmer. “The prime minister’s priority is getting parties back around the table to negotiate a lasting settlement.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose country is a particularly staunch ally of Israel, said he saw “no reason to criticize what Israel began a week ago, and also no reason to criticize what America did last weekend.”
He acknowledged “it is not without risk, but leaving things the way they were was also not an option.”
Merz said he was “somewhat optimistic” that the conflict would not widen. He said Iran’s response so far has been far short “of what we had to fear,” and that Iran’s regional proxies had shown “relatively little” reaction so far.
But he cautioned that “it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
Joyner reported from Brussels. Associated Press writers Elise Morton in London, Lorne Cook and Sam McNeil in Brussels, John Leicester in Paris, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Stephanie Liechtenstein in Vienna contributed.
France's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot, from left, Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Germany's Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, pose for photographs in the offices of the honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany in Geneva, Friday, June 20, 2025. (Fabrice Coffrini/Keystone via AP)
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas waits for a standup space as she arrives for a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Monday, June 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, center, speaks with from left, Malta's Foreign Minister Ian Borg, Slovenia's Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon, Slovakia's Foreign Minister Juraj Blanar and Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares Bueno during a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Monday, June 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
