British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched the first Mideast peace initiative since the death of Yasser Arafat, arriving for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders about a London conference.
Blair arrived late Tuesday, the highest level official to visit since Arafat's death on Nov. 11, reflecting international optimism that with a new Palestinian leadership, peace talks can be restarted.
Israel and the US boycotted Arafat, charging that he was involved in Palestinian violence. Britain did not join that, but Arafat's shunning stifled international peace moves.
In southern Gaza, Israel sent tanks and bulldozers back into the Khan Younis refugee camp early yesterday, just three days after ending an operation in response to rocket and mortar fire by Palestinian militants.
In that raid, 11 Palestinians were killed and about 40 houses destroyed.
The firing resumed after the Sunday pullout, and in the last two days, mortars hit a synagogue and a kindergarten in nearby Jewish settlements.
The military said the current push would last about two days, and abandoned buildings used as cover by militants were being destroyed. Some exchanges of gunfire were heard, but there were no reports of casualties.
Early Wednesday morning Israeli forces in Khan Younis killed one Palestinian militant, Palestinian security forces said. The Israeli military said soldiers shot an armed Palestinian in the western part of the Khan Younis refugee camp.
Also yesterday, Israeli bulldozers destroyed several homes close to the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekelim, Palestinian witnesses said. They said about 400 Palestinian schoolchildren threw stones at Israeli soldiers, and the soldiers responded by firing machine guns into the air.
Attempting to end four years of bloody violence, Britain is proposing a Mideast conference in London, but Israel has said it will not attend. Blair has said that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a high priority.
The Palestinians want the conference to deal with tough issues that have strangled previous peace efforts -- borders, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements. Israel believes the meeting should consider reforms in the Palestinian administration and not the weighty negotiation issues.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would not send an Israeli delegation, to avoid transforming the conference into a political gathering of the type Israel does not want.
In a statement on Monday, the British Foreign Office appeared to back Sharon.
"This meeting is about Palestine and practical reforms within Palestine," it said. No date has been set.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath welcomed the British initiative.
"We are favorable to any conference that will help the Palestinian people and will support the peace process based on the `road map,'" he said, referring to an internationally backed blueprint for steps and talks leading to a Palestinian state.
In another initiative on Tuesday, James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank. pushed for Palestinian economic reforms and the lifting of Israeli travel restrictions in the West Bank in exchange for an additional US$500 million in desperately need aid to the Palestinians.
The bank wants international donors, led by the US and Europe, to increase the US$930 million they provide in annual aid to the Palestinians by US$500 million, but only if both sides make the needed changes.
In his talks with Wolfensohn, Sharon said it would be "hard to open crossings and roadblocks when the Palestinians immediately exploit it for terror attacks," according to a statement from Sharon's office.
At a news conference after his meetings, Wolfensohn said further aid depends on the changes he outlined.
"If the current conditions prevail, I don't think you'll get much money," he said, adding that the two sides "do not want to let this moment pass without giving it the maximum effort."
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the