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We can confirm that our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left

concluded Tehran was in compliance with the deal governing its nuclear program.

were released, along with four other Iranians held in other parts of the U.S., Mechanich's attorney

The nuclear agreement "accelerated" the prisoner swap

U.S. federal officials said they will not comment on the names of anyone who is part of the agreement until after the four Americans are in U.S. custody

agreed to drop charges against 14 other Iranians whose extradition to the United States seemed unlikely

he freed prisoners are expected to be transported to a U.S. military hospital in Germany for medical evaluation

Iranian officials to "continue cooperating with the United States to determine the whereabouts of Robert Levinson,

FBI agent and CIA contractor, went missing in Iran in 2007.

men had been involved in exporting products and services to Iran in violation of trade sanctions against the country.

seven Iranian men walked free from detention in the United States after being pardoned and released

Three Americans freed in a prisoner swap with Iran arrived in Germany on Sunday evening after a brief stop in Switzerland, two White House officials said.

The fourth prisoner released in the swap, identified by U.S. officials as Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, decided not to leave Iran, senior White House officials said. "It's his free determination" whether he wants to stay in Iran, one official said. "We don't make that judgment."

“Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.

The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists.

They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program.

In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades.

But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap.

“Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.

A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.

Then, several weeks ago the Iranians leaked news that they were interested in a swap of their own citizens, which American officials said was an outrageous demand, because they had been indicted or convicted in a truly independent court system.

The result was two parallel races underway — one involving implementing the nuclear deal, the other to get the prisoner swap done while the moment was ripe.

For example, the United States and Iran were struggling late Saturday to define details of what kind of “advanced centrifuges” Iran will be able to develop nearly a decade from now — the kind of definitional difference that can undermine an accord.

The result was that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif veered from the monumental significance of what they were accomplishing — an end to a decade of open hostility — to the minutiae of uranium enrichment.

But Iran has something it desperately needs: Billions in cash, at a time oil shipments have been cut by more than half because of the sanctions, and below $30-a-barrel prices mean huge cuts in national revenue.

senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, though others have used higher estimates. The official said Iran will likely need to keep much of those assets abroad to facilitate international trade.

The Obama administration on Saturday also removed 400 Iranians and others from its sanctions list and took other steps to lift selected restrictions on interactions with Iran

Under the new rules put in place, the United States will no longer sanction foreign individuals or firms for buying oil and gas from Iran. The American trade embargo remains in place, but the government will permit certain limited business activities with Iran, such as selling or purchasing Iranian food and carpets and American commercial aircraft and parts.

It is unclear what will happen after the passing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has protected and often fueled the hardliners — but permitted these talks to go ahead.

whom Cruz said were detained for trying to help Iran with its nuclear program.

“They tried to kill us,” Cruz said Sunday.

The United States also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians previously sought but not in U.S. custody, as part of the deal.

“Praise God, Americans are coming home,” said Cruz, who is trailing front-running GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump but leading in Iowa, according to most polls. “But this deal is really problematic.”

Eventually, the deal got put back together by Secretary of State John Kerry and the American-educated Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Five Americans were released in Iran over the weekend in exchange for seven Iranians freed by the United States.

But it took 14 months of turbulent talks punctuated by high diplomatic drama and multiple near-collapses that paralleled the final year of nuclear negotiations. The secret negotiations were weighted by the baggage of a bitter history as the Iranian representatives berated their counterparts over past grievances, including the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1953 and American support for Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s.

The Iranians were not the only ones grappling with divisions in their government about a possible deal. The Obama administration was engaged in a vigorous debate about whether to trade Iranian prisoners and, if so, which ones, with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch objecting to any deal that equated innocent Americans seized for political gain with Iranian criminals indicted or convicted under Western legal traditions.

In the end, officials said President Obama decided that to spare the Americans years — if not life — in an Iranian prison, he would make what he called a “one-time gesture” by releasing Iranians who had been accused or convicted of violating sanctions that he was lifting anyway as part of the nuclear agreement.

Republican critics, while celebrating the release of the Americans, questioned the cost. “I think it’s a very dangerous precedent,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a leading Republican presidential candidate, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The result of this, every bad actor on earth has been told to go capture an American. If you want terrorists out of jail, capture an American and President Obama is in the let’s-make-a-deal business.”

Mr. Obama authorized a secret diplomatic channel to Iran to negotiate for their release, even as he was seeking a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. Mr. McGurk, a top State Department official who had just brokered the departure of Iraq’s problematic prime minister, was tapped in October 2014 to lead the new talks with Iran.

Brought together by the Swiss, who represent American interests in Tehran, Mr. McGurk’s team sat down with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva for the first time in November 2014, according to an account by several American officials on the condition of anonymity.

The announcement comes on a day when the United Nations' nuclear watchdog is expected to announce whether Iran is in compliance with a July deal to restrict its nuclear program.

"Based on an approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the general interests of the Islamic Republic, four Iranian prisoners with dual nationality were freed today within the framework of a prisoner swap deal," the semi-official Iranian FARS news agency quoted the office of the Tehran prosecutor as saying.

Rezaian was detained by Iran in 2014 and eventually charged with espionage and other crimes, according to the Washington Post.

Hekmati was detained in 2011, weeks after arriving in Iran to visit his grandmother, according to his family's website. The former Marine infantryman and Arabic and Persian linguist was accused of espionage and other charges in 2012.

He appeared on Iranian television and said he was working for the CIA in a confession her mother and the U.S. State Department has said was forced and fabricated.

The punishment was later overturned, but Hekmati was later convicted of "cooperating with hostile governments" and sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to a website set up by his supporters.

Abedini, an Iran native and convert to Christinanity, was arrested in 2012 and convicted the next year on charges of attempting to undermine the Iranian government. He had been sentenced to eight years in prison.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based group dedicated to protecting religious and constitutional freedoms, reported that Abedini has endured torture during his imprisonment and was beaten by fellow prisoners in June.

Abedini's wife, Naghmeh Abedini, said in the statement that the release was "an answer to prayer."

The releases appear to leave unresolved the fate of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and CIA contractor who disappeared after visiting Iran in 2007. As described in Iranian media, the deal does not appear to include Levinson, who is not Iranian-American.

new sanctions on those involved with Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests conducted in violation of United Nations restrictions, but he did not elaborate or dwell on that dispute.

“We have a rare chance to pursue a new path, a different, better future that delivers progress for both our peoples and the wider world,” said Mr. Obama,

But Mr. Obama vowed to continue monitoring Iran’s nuclear program to ensure it does not cheat and said he would work to restrain any aggressive behavior by Iran, including terrorist activity and human rights abuses.

The release of the Americans came a day after Iran and the United States concluded delicate negotiations on a prisoner exchange tied indirectly to the completion of a nuclear agreement.

optics of the back-to-back sanctions announcements might seem to suggest that Washington was imposing new measures to make up for those that were lifted Saturday, they are actually nowhere near comparable.

The action taken Saturday allowed Iran to re-enter the world’s oil markets;

The new sanctions are mostly aimed at individuals and some small companies accused of shipping crucial technologies to Iran,

in addition to the completion of the nuclear deal and the prisoner swap, the United States and Iran had resolved a three-decade-old financial dispute.

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, did not address the prisoner swap on Sunday. At a news conference, he said that since the sanctions were lifted, the door had opened for foreign investments in the country, even by American companies.

A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, was also released by Iran, though his release was not part of the negotiated prisoner swap.

The International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had fulfilled its obligations under the nuclear deal that six world powers struck with Tehran. The United States responded by announcing it would end its sanctions on Iran, freeing up $150 billion in frozen assets.

The coronavirus crisis explodes that 20th-century framework and poses the question: How does America’s central bank supply dollar liquidity to a polycentric world economy?

In 2013, the agreement to swap was made permanent. A privileged group of central banks — those of Canada, Britain, Switzerland and Japan, as well as the European Central Bank — were granted what amounted to unlimited drawing rights on dollars, in exchange for which they would give their own currency as collateral.

But they are also a tool of geopolitics: The dollar network provides a financial safety net for the banks of America’s major allies. It is not by accident that no swap was ever considered for Russia or China.

Three things have changed since 2008. First, dollars are being used on a new scale by new financial actors. Second, the balance of the world economy has further shifted from the European Union-United States-Japan axis toward emerging markets. And third, the politics of the world economy have become far more antagonistic.

As for the growing power of emerging markets, China leads the way. But the growth of economies like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey has also been spectacular. Once a relatively marginal part of the world economy, the emerging economies are now key drivers of global growth

Finally, there is the question of China. In 2008, China was already the main driver of global growt

Today, the country’s economy is larger than ever, as are its holdings of American assets. All told, the foreign debts of China’s businesses come to $1.3 trillion. As the global scramble for dollars begins and the American currency rises in value, those debts become less sustainable. That risks unleashing a chain reaction.

Now the U.S. Treasury market is shaking, and the relationship between the two counties — in an era of viral conspiracy theories and trade wars — has sharply deteriorated. How can the Fed manage relations with China’s central bank in these circumstances?

"I have dreams, and hopes and ambitions. Every girl graduating today does," Smith said

"And without our input and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us."

Her remarks came less than two weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed new restrictions into law that ban abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — as early as six weeks.

As Smith noted, many women do not realize they're pregnant at six weeks. The law does not allow exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

The senior had intended to use her speech to talk about TV and the media, but, she said, "it feels wrong to talk about anything but what is currently affecting me and millions of other women in the state."

Smith says she has received hundreds of messages of support, as videos of her graduation speech were widely shared across social media. In many ways, the speech went better than she anticipated, especially since the school had raised the possibility of remarks being cut short if they diverged from the approved script.

But noting that Smith's speech was not approved and "not in the podium book" of remarks for the event, the district says it will look at ways to prevent similar switches from taking place in the future.

Recently, the Heartbeat Bill was passed in Texas. Starting in September, there will be a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, regardless of whether the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest.

Six weeks. That's all women get. And so before they realize — most of them don't realize that they're pregnant by six weeks — so before they have a chance to decide if they are emotionally, physically and financially stable enough to carry out a full-term pregnancy, before they have the chance to decide if they can take on the responsibility of bringing another human being into the world, that decision is made for them by a stranger.A decision that will affect the rest of their lives is made by a stranger.

I have dreams and hopes and ambitions. Every girl graduating today does. And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future. And without our input and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us. [applause]

I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter. I hope that you can feel how gut-wrenching that is. I hope you can feel how dehumanizing it is, to have the autonomy over your own body taken away from you.

For their part, Third Way representatives bristle at the idea they are doing the bidding of Wall Street power brokers.

The philosophy set out by Third Way will be part of that conversation.

Third Way raises just over a third of its $9.3 million annual budget from undisclosed corporations. The remainder, the bulk of its funding, is donated by individuals, almost all of whom are members of Third Way’s board of trustees.

Both Vogelstein and Heller were major financial backers of Obama, and all three contributed heavily to Senate Democrats.

“We’re not remotely aligned with what Wall Street wants,” said Jonathan Cowan, the group’s president and cofounder.

“It goes back to what Bill Clinton said, which is ‘You can’t love the job and hate the job creators,’ ” said Matt Bennett, Third Way’s vice president for public affairs and one of its cofounders. “Vilification of industry isn’t helping Democrats.”

They insist on deficit reduction and entitlement cuts as conditions for key tax hikes on the wealthy.

Third Way’s insistence on linking tax hikes to a grand bargain — which has been impossible to obtain in the Obama era — has a direct bearing on the wallets of the group’s wealthy funders.

“If the Democratic Party stands only for raising taxes on the wealthy, not for actually making entitlement reforms and other spending cuts,’’ he said, “then the other half of the equation will never happen.”

Bennett said it should not be characterized as a donation from Goldman Sachs, but as a personal contribution from Heller that was made through the Goldman charity.

Though Third Way does not report details of its contributions, some of its donors do so through private foundations.

Third Way’s 2012 tax filing. Peck Madigan, which did not respond to e-mailed questions, lobbies for several Wall Street-tied clients, including MasterCard, Deutsche Bank, and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job

He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors,

“A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”

In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending

Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run.

the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money

As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.

we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him

He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.

Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks

Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.

Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality.

Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)

Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.

“Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas.

wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game

Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk

he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”

Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry

on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”

both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”

Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial succes

Sailors balanced out the weight by leaving behind their ships' ballast: stones, gravel and soil. They swapped English dirt for Virginia tobacco. That dirt very likely contained the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm. So, almost certainly, did the rootballs of plants that the colonists imported.

In worm-free woodlands, leaves pile up in drifts on the forest floor. Trees and shrubs in wormless places depend on litter for food. When earthworms arrive, they quickly consume the leaf litter, packing the nutrients deep in the soil in the form of castings (worm excrement). Suddenly, the plants can no longer feed themselves; their fine, surface-level root systems are in the wrong place. Wild sarsaparilla, wild oats, Solomon's seal and a host of understory plants die off; grass-like species such as Pennsylvania sedge take over. Sugar maples almost stop growing, and ash seedlings start to thrive.

Transported in the bodies of sailors, malaria may have crossed the ocean as early as Columbus's second voyage. Yellow fever, malaria's frequent companion, soon followed. By the 17th century, the zone where these diseases held sway—coastal areas roughly from Washington, D.C., to the Brazil-Ecuador border—was dangerous territory for European migrants, many of whom died within months of arrival

Initially, American planters preferred to pay to import European laborers—they spoke the same language and knew European farming methods. They also cost less than slaves bought from Africa, but they were far less hardy and thus a riskier investment. In purely economic terms, the historian Philip Curtin has calculated, the diseases of the Columbian Exchange made the enslaved worker "preferable at anything up to three times the price of the European."

At the time, England and Scotland shared a monarch but remained separate nations. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for decades. Scots had resisted, fearing a London-dominated economy, but now England promised to reimburse investors in the failed Panama project as part of a union agreement. As Mr. McNeill wrote, "Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama."

Eighteenth-century farmers who planted potatoes reaped about four times as much dry food matter as they did from wheat or barley. Hunger was then a familiar presence in Europe. France had 40 nationwide food calamities between 1500 and 1800, more than one every decade, according to the French historian Fernand Braudel. England had still more. The continent simply could not sustain itself. The potato allowed most of Europe—a 2,000-mile band between Ireland and the Ukraine—to feed itself. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar role in Italy and Romania.) Political stability, higher incomes and a population boom were the result. Imported from Peru, the potato became the fuel for the rise of Europe.

The sweet potato played a similar role in China. Introduced (along with corn) from South America via the Pacific silver trade in the 1590s, it suddenly provided a way for Chinese farmers to cultivate upland areas that had been unusable for rice paddies. The nutritious new crop encouraged the fertility boom of the Qing dynasty, but the experiment soon went badly wrong. Because Chinese farmers had never cultivated their dry uplands, they made beginners' mistakes. An increase in erosion led to extraordinary levels of flooding, which in turn fed popular unrest and destabilized the government. The new crops that had helped to strengthen Europe were a key factor in weakening China.

European ships accidentally imported the fungus-like organism, native to Peru, that causes the potato disease known as late blight. First appearing in Flanders in June 1845, it was carried by winds to potato farms around Paris in August. Weeks later it wiped out fields in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Blight appeared in Ireland on Sept. 13.

the Columbian Exchange, like a biological Internet, has put every part of the natural world in contact with every other, refashioning it, for better or worse, at a staggering rate.

: “If the United States doesn’t stand for freedom, then who does? What were all those lives lost for?”

“Obama hasn’t talked about stopping the repression,” he said. “Not only that, but the prisoner swap tells any terrorist group around the world that they can capture an American and that he can be exchanged for any terrorist they want.” Next in U.S.

Mr. Hoenig devised a list of three criteria for banks that could be exempted from some regulations without posing risks to the financial system and taxpayers.The winners: banks that hold no trading assets or liabilities, those that have no derivatives positions other than plain-vanilla interest-rate swaps and foreign exchange derivatives and, finally, banks whose notional value of all derivatives exposures totals less than $3 billion.

Roughly 6,100 of the more than 6,500 commercial banks would pass this test, according to the F.D.I.C. Of the remaining 400 that would not, many are behemoths: 310 of them have more than $250 million in assets.Clearly, this is a regulatory relief proposal that benefits bankers on Main Street, not Wall Street.

it’s not only small banks that could catch a break on regulations under the Hoenig plan. His office said it had identified 18 banks with total assets greater than $10 billion that would qualify

Banks meeting the criteria set out by Mr. Hoenig would not be exempt from the Volcker Rule, which was intended to separate banks’ risk-taking trading desks from their federally insured units. That’s because these banks aren’t engaging in these kinds of practices.

The clamor for regulatory relief from large and politically connected financial institutions has been a constant ever since Dodd-Frank was enacted five years ago. First, these institutions worked to water down the rules as the regulators were writing them. Now they are pushing for repeal.

Sergeant Bergdahl has been the focus of attacks by Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign

Donald J. Trump, for one, has called the sergeant a “traitor” who should be executed, while Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has vowed to hold hearings if the sergeant is not punished.

No date has been set for Sergeant Bergdahl’s next court hearing, which will be held at Fort Bragg, the Army said. He is currently assigned to the Army’s Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, the site of his preliminary hearing in September.

General Abrams’s decision came just days after Sergeant Bergdahl was heard for the first time publicly explaining why he left his base, in taped interviews that were broadcast by the podcast “Serial” last week.

In the interviews, which were recorded by Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer, Sergeant Bergdahl said that he realized within 20 minutes of leaving that he had done “something serious.”

In the interviews, he told the same story that he had described to the Army’s investigating officer, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, about why he left the outpost: He wanted to cause a crisis by hiking to another base 18 miles away that would allow him to have an audience with a senior Army commander where he could outline what he felt were serious leadership problems endangering his unit.

Sergeant Bergdahl told Mr. Boal that during his hike he had also decided to surveil Taliban fighters emplacing improvised explosive devices that could be used to kill American soldiers, and to turn that information over to commanders when he arrived at the other base. He said that he “was trying to prove to the world” that he was a top soldier, and that in some sense he even wanted to emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the spy-movie character.

Republicans have asserted that the swap would embolden the Taliban to kidnap other Americans and that it was done without the required notification of Congress. Some Republicans and members of Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit have also asserted that a half-dozen or more American troops died searching for him.

But in his testimony, General Dahl — who was recently promoted from major general to lieutenant general — said that no troops had died specifically searching for Sergeant Bergdahl and that no evidence was found to support claims that he intended to walk to China or India or that he was a Taliban sympathizer.

“These are always situations which, as everybody here knows, have the ability, if not properly guided, to get out of control. I’m appreciative for the quick and appropriate response of the Iranian authorities.”

In fact, it is clear that today this kind of issue was able to be peacefully resolved, and officially resolved, and that is a testament to the critical role that diplomacy plays in keeping the country safe, secure and strong.”

The US defence secretary, Ash Carter, said: “I am pleased that 10 US navy sailors have departed Iran and are now back in US hands. I want to personally thank secretary of state John Kerry for his diplomatic engagement with Iran to secure our sailors’ swift return. Around the world, the US navy routinely provides assistance to foreign sailors in distress, and we appreciate the timely way in which this situation was resolved.”

The Revolutionary Guards patrol Iranian waters in the Gulf, especially near the strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes in tankers.

The swift release of the Americans contradicted speculation that the hardline Revolutionary Guards were seeking to sabotage improving relations between Iran and the west days before the planned implementation of the nuclear deal reached in Vienna in July

In an unusual move, the Guards last week condemned the attack by a group of hardliners on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, showing an approach in line with that of the Rouhani administration.

Once Iran finishes swapping the core of a heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak with cement, they will receive an influx of cash under the July deal.

Zarif and Kerry continued to meet, while Brett McGurk, head of the State Department's counter-Islamic State coalition, ran a separate diplomatic track with different Iranian officials as part of the effort to keep the prisoner negotiations separate from the then-ongoing nuclear talks.

Ultimately, the two countries agreed on seven Iranians: three who were serving prison time and four who were awaiting trial. All seven were facing charges related to violations of nuclear sanctions -- which were lifted on Saturday. “So there was a symmetry here,” Kerry said.

Critics of the prisoner agreement, namely Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates, argue that any type of swap or exchange is unjust.

The deal leaves American citizen Siamak Namazi, who was arrested in October, in prison. And it doesn’t provide answers about Robert Levinson, the American CIA contractor who disappeared in 2007.

Kerry sees the prisoner deal as a positive precedent for Levinson's and Namazi's cases.

Kerry credits the nuclear deal with showing that Iran and the U.S., despite having no formal diplomatic ties, can work together to resolve issues peacefully.

According to Kerry, Zarif suggested that there was room for the two countries to work cooperatively on other issues, including in Yemen and Syria, where the U.S. and Iran are effectively fighting on opposite sides of proxy wars.

"This is a unique arrangement," one U.S. official said. "This is a humanitarian gesture."

The Obama administration has been criticized by several Republican presidential candidates, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump, for reaching the nuclear deal with Iran while the Americans remained imprisoned.

When news first broke of the incident involving the sailors, tensions were high, the official said. But the way it was quickly resolved allowed the parties to return to wrapping up negotiations on the prisoners.

Iran had initially insisted Jason Rezaian's fate could only be decided by Tehran's judicial system rather than through political accommodation with the U.S. But the nuclear deal, reached last year, held out hope for increased dialogue about Rezaian and the other Americans.

"There are a number of Iranians in the United States who are imprisoned, who went to prison as a result of activities related to the nuclear industry in Iran," he said through an interpreter.

"I have raised them in all of our sessions. We've had a lot of conversations. We are continuing those conversations now. And I am hopeful that the day will come soon, obviously sooner rather than later, but soon, when all of our citizens can come home," Kerry said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's declaration unlocked some $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets overseas, and potentially even greater economic benefits through suspended oil, trade and financial sanctions by the U.S. and European Union.

One of the last hiccups that delayed the Americans' departure was an Iranian military official's misunderstanding about Rezaian's wife and mother joining him on the flight. After Kerry spoke to Zarif, permission was granted.

Israel remains steadfastly opposed to the Iran deal and any rapprochement with Tehran. Sunni Saudi Arabia has had tension with Iran since executing a Shiite cleric on Jan. 2, which led to a severing of diplomatic ties between the two.