Sunday, July 4, 2010

The coming days

The coming days

The week ahead

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, visits Barack Obama in Washington

jas

• ISRAEL'S prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is set to travel to Washington for a meeting with Barack Obama on Tuesday July 6th. Mr Netanyahu’s previous date with America’s president at the beginning of June was postponed after Israeli forces killed nine people in a raid on a boat attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of an Israeli blockade. Mr Obama will be keen to find a way to encourage Israeli and Palestinian leaders to begin direct talks again. Face-to-face negotiations were suspended in December 2008 after Israel’s deadly offensive against Gaza intended to stop rocket attacks from the territory. In a sign of a thawing of relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Ehud Barak, the country’s defence minister, said that he would shortly meet Salam Fayyad, the PA’s prime minister.

• THE lower house of France’s parliament begins debate on Tuesday July 6th over the controversial issue of banning women from wearing full Muslim veils in public before a vote likely to be held the following week. A burqa ban, which has the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy, is also winning support in other parts of Europe. Belgium’s lower house has approved a similar measure and Spain Senate recently narrowly voted to impose a ban too. But the Council of Europe, an EU institution that oversees the human rights of Europeans, has voted unanimously to oppose any national bans on the burqa in EU countries. It also called on Switzerland to reverse its ban on the construction of minarets.

• AS BP’s battle to contain the spill of oil into the Gulf of Mexico continues, other energy companies hoping to extract the black stuff from deep under the sea around America will have their hopes pinned on an appeals court hearing on Thursday July 8th. Barack Obama’s administration saw its six-month moratorium on deep water drilling overturned by a federal judge on June 22nd but will hope that the higher court reimposes the ban, pending investigation of the causes of the catastrophic leak after an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig.

• THE ruling Democratic Party of Japan faces elections for the upper house of the country’s parliament on Sunday July 11th. Recent polls cast doubt on the ability of the DPJ and an ally may not win enough seats to guarantee a majority which it needs to ease the passage of planned legislation to cut huge public debts. The popularity of Naoto Kan, the country’s prime minister, plunged after he called for debate on increasing sales taxes as part of measures to restore Japan’s battered public finances. If Mr Kan’s party fares particularly badly he may also face a challenge to his leadership from within the DPJ.

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