A rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed a 75-year-old Israeli woman on Monday, just as an Egyptian mediator was winding up truce talks in Israel -- underlining both the urgency and complexity of working out a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza.
The deadly rocket hit a house in the village of Yesha, about 6km from Gaza. As recently as Friday, a fatal rocket attack unleashed Israeli reprisals that left five Palestinians dead in Gaza airstrikes.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. On Monday morning, Islamic Jihad fired two Grad rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon. No one was hurt.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev denounced the attack but did not say it would halt the truce talks.
"The rocket fire into Israel will end, it will end either because calm will be achieved, or Israel will act to protect its people," he said.
The talks by mediator Omar Suleiman, Egypt's powerful intelligence chief, produced no tangible results on Monday, even before the rocket blasted the house in southern Israel.
Suleiman brought the results of months of talks with the Hamas rulers of Gaza and many smaller militant groups to Israeli leaders for their comments. The outline of the deal would be a six-month truce, stopping the Palestinian rocket and mortar fire and Israeli reprisals. Also, Israel would ease the punishing blockade it imposed after Hamas took power in a violent sweep through Gaza last June.
Israeli officials did not reject the elements of the package, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted on freedom for a soldier, Corporal Gilad Schalit, captured in a cross-border raid in June 2006, and others demanded an end to smuggling of arms from Egypt.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS