Thursday, Apr 03rd
Last update06:53:29 AM GMT
International Glance
Russia has presented the U.S. with a list of demands for a deal to end its war against Ukraine and reset relations with Washington, according to two people familiar with the matter.
President Trump's proposal to move all Palestinians out of Gaza has taken on a life of its own in Israel.
Israeli officials say they're working on a plan to create a migration authority to help relocate the vast majority of Gaza's two million people. A senior Cabinet minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says Israel is working with the Trump administration to locate countries that would take them in. Surveys suggest the majority of Israelis are open to the idea.
Whether it will actually happen is another matter. Dozens of Arab and Muslim-majority countries have rejected the notion as ethnic cleansing. Trump said he would not force the idea after Egypt and Jordan rejected it.
"We paid Jordan and Egypt a lot — billions of dollars a year, and I was a little surprised they'd say that, but they did," Trump said on Fox News Radio on Feb. 21. "I think that's the plan that really works. But I'm not forcing it. I'm just going to sit back and recommend it."
What remains is a radically changed discourse in Israel.
The United States will resume sending military aid and intelligence to Ukraine after Ukraine agreed to a Trump administration proposal for a monthlong ceasefire, the U.S. and Ukraine said after talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
It was the first high-level meeting between Ukraine and the U.S. since the Trump administration froze military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine in the wake of a televised blowup between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in late February.
In a joint statement, both countries' governments said Tuesday's talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, marked "important steps toward restoring durable peace for Ukraine."
After his arrest on an international criminal court (ICC) warrant on Tuesday, the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, demonstrated an uncharacteristic concern for due legal process. A petition was unsuccessfully filed to his country’s supreme court to stay his extradition, as lawyers challenged the ICC’s jurisdiction, and pleas were made for any trial to take place in a Philippine court.
The relatives of those butchered during Mr Duterte’s brutal and lawless “war on drugs” will struggle to sympathise. Notoriously, many of its victims never got near a courtroom of any description. In 2016, months into a presidency in which thousands of Filipinos suffered summary executions, Mr Duterte readily acknowledged an indiscriminate dimension to the lawless carnage he had unleashed. The deaths of innocents and children, he told reporters, amounted to inevitable “collateral damage” in his mission to clean up the streets.
Given a green light from the top, vigilante gangs and hired hitmen turned the poorer parts of Manila and his home city of Davao into killing zones. Corrupt police were allegedly financially incentivised to shoot suspects rather than arrest them. Only a handful of officers were ever convicted of a crime. Testifying to the Philippine senate last October, the former president offered “no apologies, no excuses” for this reign of terror, during which foreign criticism was dismissed with swaggering contempt and internal opponents threatened and imprisoned.
A Ukrainian delegation set to meet with America’s top diplomat in Saudi Arabia about ending the 3-year war with Russia will propose a ceasefire covering the Black Sea and long-range missile strikes, as well as the release of prisoners, two senior Ukrainian officials said Monday.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about Tuesday’s meeting, also told The Associated Press that the Ukrainian delegation is ready during the talks to sign an agreement with the United States on access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals — a deal that U.S. President Donald Trump is keen to secure.
The officials discussed the confidence-building measures, with no further details, ahead of the Ukrainian negotiating team’s meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Jeddah.
Kyiv is trying to repair the damage done when Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Feb. 28 visit to Washington descended into an Oval Office argument with Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
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Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said leaders should “not give in to bullies” after he was lashed by Donald Trump in a late-night social media post.
Taking to Truth Social platform just before midnight Sunday night in Washington DC, the US president said Turnbull led Australia from “behind” and did not understand China.
“Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister of Australia who was always leading that wonderful country from ‘behind’ never understood what was going on in China, nor did he have the capacity to do so. I always thought he was a weak and ineffective leader and, obviously, Australian’s [sic] agreed with me!!!”
The post appears to be in response to an interview by Turnbull with Bloomberg in which he said Trump’s chaotic leadership style would benefit China, to the detriment of the US.
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Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister-designate, blasted Donald Trump in a blistering speech after his landslide victory in the governing Liberal Party’s election.
The 59-year-old former central banker made Canada’s increasingly fraught relationship with the Trump administration the centerpiece of his Sunday night address, calling America “a country we can no longer trust” and warning that like-for-like tariffs would continue “until the Americans show us respect.”
Carney takes over from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who remains prime minister until his successor is sworn in in the coming days.
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