Gloom and low expectations cast a shadow over a meeting of Middle East mediators in New York yesterday because of uncertainty in Palestinian politics and a preoccupation with Iraq.
High-level representatives of the US, the EU, Russia and the UN will meet at UN headquarters to take stock of the stalemate in carrying out the Middle East peace plan they floated in April.
The plan has been bogged down over Israeli demands that the Palestinian Authority crack down on militants and Palestinian suspicions that Israel would give nothing in return even if the authority dismantles militant groups like Hamas.
In the meantime, violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israeli threats to expel or kill Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, have made it harder to resume talks.
A senior US official said the mediators, known as the Middle East Quartet, were waiting to see what kind of Palestinian government emerges under prime minister-designate Ahmed Qurie, also known as Abu Ala. Arafat named Qurie to take over from Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned in protest at US and Israeli policies and at Arafat's failure to give him the authority he wanted.
The meeting brings together US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and three European officials led by foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
They act as sponsors and advocates of the Middle East "road map," which sets out steps Israelis and Palestinians must make to achieve a permanent two-state peace settlement by 2005. The Quartet is divided three-to-one, the US against the rest, on the question of whether they should treat Arafat as the representative of the Palestinian people.
Diplomats said foreign ministers of the G8's major industrialized powers shared a sense of despair about the worsening conflict when they discussed it on Wednesday night. While they agreed to keep the Quartet alive, the mood was one of hopelessness, one diplomat said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing