Month: October 2023

BEIJING (TIP): China has sent an envoy to the Middle East to push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the latest sign of its ambition to play a larger role in the region.
Envoy Zhai Jun’s first meetings included one in Qatar with a Russian counterpart on October 19 as the two countries stake out a position at odds with the American approach.
The two sides confirmed their “unwavering focus on closely coordinating efforts for the political settlement of this and other crises in the Middle East and North Africa region,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said, according to the country’s Tass state news agency.
“We believe that when dealing with hot-spot issues in the international community, major powers should be objective and impartial,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Friday. Analysts say that China wants to position itself as a mediator and exert its influence in the region as the US shifts its global attention elsewhere. But the latest Gaza war has drawn the US back in, with President Joe Biden visiting Israel this week.
Zhai held meetings in Qatar with Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian president’s special representative for the Middle East and Africa, and with Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Mohammed Abdulaziz al-Khulaifi, Mao said. She added that Zhai would travel to other Mideast countries but did not give any details on which ones or when.
Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week that “Egypt and other Arab countries highly appreciate China’s consistent and just position on the Palestinian question and expect China to play a bigger role in solving the current crisis,” according to a Chinese statement on their meeting.
Xi told Madbouly, who was in Beijing to attend a forum on China’s Belt and Road infrastructure-building initiative, that the top priority is to stop the fighting and prevent it from causing a severe humanitarian crisis.
He said China “stands ready to strengthen coordination with Egypt and other Arab countries to work for a comprehensive, just and enduring solution to the Palestinian question,” the Chinese statement said. (AP)

LONDON (TIP): Britain’s main opposition Labour Party decisively won two special elections on October 20, snatching seats in Parliament that long were rock-solid bastions of the governing Conservatives. Voters in Tamworth, central England, and Mid-Bedfordshire, located north of London, switched from the Conservative Party to Labour in almost unprecedented numbers. The outcome solidified Labour’s status as the front-runner ahead of a national election next year and piled more pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to turn his party’s fortunes around. Labour leader Keir Starmer claimed his party was “redrawing the political map.”
“People are fed up to the back teeth after 13 years of decline under this government. They want a fresh start,” Starmer said as he visited Tamworth to congratulate winning Labour candidate Sarah Edwards. Along with Edwards’ victory in Tamworth, where the Conservatives won by almost 20,000 votes in 2019, Labour candidate Alistair Strathern took Mid-Bedfordshire by overturning a 25,000-vote Tory margin.
John Curtice, a polling expert at the University of Strathclyde, said the “exceptional swings” to Labour could be compared to the collapse in Conservative support that took place under Prime Minister John Major in the 1990s. “And we all know how that ended,” Curtice said — in a landslide 1997 election victory for Labour under Tony Blair.
Others cautioned that turnout in Thursday’s voting was low,, with turnout at 36% in Tamworth and 44% in Mid-Bedfordshire, and the elections were unusual because they were held to replace lawmakers who both resigned under a cloud.
Chris Pincher, who represented Tamworth, quit after Parliament’s standards watchdog recommended his suspension for “completely inappropriate” behavior. Pincher was accused of groping two men at a London private members’ club. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’ s reluctance to sanction the Conservative legislator when the allegations emerged helped trigger Johnson’s ouster at the hands of his own party last year.
Mid-Bedfordshire member of Parliament Nadine Dorries resigned over the treatment of Johnson and her own failure to be appointed to Parliament’s upper chamber, the House of Lords. Dorries is a strong ally of Johnson who has blamed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for helping to topple the former leader.
Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands blamed the losses on “legacy issues” and said people were “happy with the job Rishi Sunak is doing as prime minister.”
The results add to pressure on the governing party, which has lost several byelections since Sunak took office just under a year ago. He replaced Liz Truss, who announced her resignation a year ago Friday after her plan for unfunded tax cuts sent financial markets into turmoil and rocked the economy.
Truss spent just seven weeks in office after winning a party leadership contest to replace Boris Johnson, who quit after three years in office when scandals over money and ethics turned party lawmakers against him.
Sunak steadied the economy but has not managed to boost the party’s rating in opinion polls, where it consistently lags between 10 and 20 points behind Labour. A national election must be called by the end of 2024. The Conservatives have been in power nationally since 2010, years that saw austerity following the world banking crisis, Britain’s divisive decision to leave the European Union, a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine that has triggered the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.
Sunak has tried to rally support by arguing he has a long-term vision and is prepared to make tough decisions to change Britain. But Friday’s results confirmed polls showing the Conservatives losing support across the country, from affluent southern voters turned off by Brexit to working-class northern towns where voters switched from Labour in 2019 after Johnson promised to spread prosperity to long-neglected areas.
Starmer, who has moved his social democratic party toward the political center since becoming leader in 2020, said former Conservative voters had “put their trust and their confidence in us.” “We we accept this victory humbly, knowing that we have to earn the votes of voters across the whole of the country, and we do that by putting our positive case to the country,” he said. (AP)

JERUSALEM (TIP): The Israeli army announced plans to evacuate the northern city of Kiryat Shmona on October 20, after days of clashes with Hezbollah fighters along the border with Lebanon. “A short while ago, the Northern Command informed the mayor of the city of the decision. The plan will be managed by the local authority, the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Defence,” the military said in a statement.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah and allied Palestinian factions have traded cross-border fire with Israel for days, after Hamas gunmen attacked communities in southern Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,400 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials.
More than 3,700 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed across the Gaza Strip in retaliatory Israeli bombardments, according to figures from its Hamas-run health ministry.
Israel’s military said its forces continued to target Hezbollah targets as tensions grew along the border. “The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) carried out a number of attacks against Hezbollah infrastructure, including observation posts,” the army said early Friday.
“In addition, IDF fighter jets struck three terrorists who attempted to launch anti-tank missiles toward Israel.”
Israeli authorities have been steadily evacuating communities across the northern frontier, as reservists and columns of tanks and armoured vehicles poured into the area.
The Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement, Lebanon’s only armed faction that did not disarm after the 1975-1990 civil war, last fought a major conflict with Israel in 2006.
That war left more than 1,200 dead in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 in Israel, mostly soldiers, in a conflict that left deep scars and the border bristling with guns. (AFP)

Rome (TIP) : Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on October 20 she was separating from her partner, with whom she has a daughter, after he was recorded making sleazy comments.
The announcement came after Andrea Giambruno, a television presenter, was caught making overtly sexual and sexist comments to female colleagues off-air.
“My relationship with Andrea Giambruno, which lasted almost 10 years, ends here,” Meloni wrote on social media, saying their paths had “diverged for some time”.
“How do you do, darling?” Giambruno is heard telling a female colleague on the sidelines of his talk show on the Rete 4 channel, owned by Mediaset.
“Do you know that (name redacted) and I are having an affair? All of Mediaset knows it and now you do too,” he tells the woman, who is also off camera
“But we’re looking for a third person, as we do threesomes. Foursomes too. Would you like to be part of our working group?” he says in remarks broadcast by a different television channel on Tuesday and Thursday.
In another comment, he says: “Can I touch my balls while I talk to you?”
On Friday afternoon, a spokesman for Mediaset, which is owned by the Berlusconi family, told the ANSA news agency Giambruno had been suspended as a presenter while the company looked into the situation.
Family values
The news of the break-up coincides with the one-year anniversary this weekend of Meloni’s accession to power at the head of a hard-right government which strongly defends traditional family values.
The pair never married but Meloni always brushed off suggestions that her marital status was at odds with her position on family, which is that children should have a mother and a father.
Giambruno, who she met in a broadcast studio while giving an interview, has increasingly become a source of headlines for his controversial comments.
In August, he was accused of victim blaming for remarks he made while discussing two gang rapes this summer that had shocked Italy.
On his talk show, he said: “If you avoid getting drunk and losing your senses, you might also avoid running into certain problems and coming across a wolf.”
He had also hit back when a German minister on holiday in Italy complained about the heat, saying: “If you don’t like it, stay at home.”
In her social media post on Friday, Meloni thanked Giambruno for “the splendid years we spent together, for the difficulties we went through and for giving me the most important thing in my life, our daughter Ginevra”.
Meloni has previously spoken of the challenges of juggling family life with running the government, and takes Ginevra, seven, on official trips wherever she can.
She did not mention the recordings of Giambruno’s remarks in her statement.
But she warned anyone who hoped to use her personal life against her: “While the drop may hope to hollow out the stone, the stone remains a stone and the drop is just water”.
Meloni’s coalition allies rallied around her. Matteo Salvini, of the far-right, anti-immigration League, told her: “Go forward with your head held high!” (AFP)