US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Geneva Friday to join talks on Iran’s nuclear program

US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Geneva Friday to join talks on Iran's nuclear program, fuelling hopes a historic agreement may be within reach.
  
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was also rushing to Geneva to join the negotiations. Tehran and world powers ended a first day of talks Thursday with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif saying a deal could be reached "before we close these negotiations."
  
Kerry will go to the Swiss city "in an effort to help narrow differences in negotiations" and at the invitation of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, a senior State Department official said.
 
Upending an 11-day tour mostly of the Middle East, Kerry was due to arrive in Geneva later Friday and hold three-way talks with Zarif and Ashton, who is representing the six powers.
  
Kerry met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Tel Aviv airport Friday, flying in especially from Amman on his way to Geneva. "This is a very bad deal. Israel utterly rejects it," Netanyahu told reporters before beginning the talks, saying Iran was getting "the deal of the century".
  
Iran's Zarif was due to meet early Friday with Ashton, who is chairing the talks on behalf of the P5+1 group of world powers -- permanent UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany.
  
In their second meeting in Geneva in less than a month, Iranian negotiators sat down for a series of talks on Thursday that Western officials described as "substantive" and "productive." "There is a window of opportunity now that has been created by the Iranian people... and that opportunity needs to be seized," Zarif said.