US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered on Monday to help Britain and Argentina resolve a simmering row over a south Atlantic archipelago but balked at an Argentine request for US mediation.
Clinton gave no sign Washington would prod ally Britain into dropping its refusal to respond to Argentina’s new campaign for dialogue on the sovereignty of the Falklands after a British firm began drilling for oil last month.
During a press conference with the visiting US chief diplomat, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner publicly asked the US to play a mediating role.
However, Clinton sidestepped the issue.
“We would like to see Argentina and the UK sit down and resolve the issues between them in a peaceful and productive way,” Clinton said as she stood next to Kirchner in an ornate room of the Casa Rosada presidential palace.
“We want very much to encourage both countries to sit down and we cannot make either one do so,” the secretary of state said when pressed further on the issue by a Spanish-speaking journalist.
“But we think it is the right way to proceed. So we will be saying this publicly, as I have been, and we will continue to encourage exactly the kind of discussion across the table that needs to take place,” she said.
Speaking through an interpreter, Kirchner said: “What we have requested is [US] mediation, as a friendly country, of both Argentina and the UK so as to get both countries to sit down at the table.”
Kirchner repeated Argentine demands that dialogue must be based on UN Security Council resolutions.
Buenos Aires is angry that London continues to skirt UN resolutions calling on both governments to renew a dialogue on the sovereignty of the Falklands.
Clinton’s comments come a week after a US State Department spokesman said the two countries should hold “good-faith dialogue” to overcome their differences.
Britain, which claims its sovereignty of the islands is clear under international law, has ignored the call for talks, which has the backing of Argentina’s regional allies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Argentina has claimed the islands for more than a century, and wants Britain to discuss a Hong Kong-style departure plan.
London has argued that Falkland Islanders, who have British citizenship, should have the right of self-determination.
The Falklands lie 450km off the South American Atlantic coast. Britain has held the windswept South Atlantic Ocean archipelago since 1833 in the face of claims by Argentina, which calls them the Malvinas.
Argentina invaded the islands in 1982, prompting a short but bloody war with Britain in which 649 Argentine troops and 255 British military personnel died.
Latin American countries were shocked and irate when the US sided with Britain in the 1982 conflict. During a visit to Montevideo, the capital of neighboring Uruguay, and on the plane to Buenos Aires, Clinton urged dialogue but said Washington could not make it happen if one side did not agree.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS