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

• 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 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. ...

A trade pact will draw China and Taiwan closer togther

• IMPROVING relations between China and Taiwan will get another boost with the signing of a groundbreaking free-trade pact by the end of June. Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s president, was elected in 2008 on a platform that called for better ties with China. A free-trade pact with the mainland is the cornerstone of his cross-strait policies. Taiwan, already isolated diplomatically, feared commercial marginalisation when the effects of a free-trade agreement between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) begins to be felt later this year. Mr Ma has already overseen the establishment of direct flights and shipping routes across the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

•AMERICA'S Supreme Court is likely to hand down a decision involving the Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002 on Monday June 28th. The legislation, intended to tighten the auditing of public companies in the wake of the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, has been widely criticised for imposing costly and burdensome regulations on American businesses. The court will rule on the constitutionality of the board created to oversee independent audits of big companies. But firms may fear that if Sarbanes-Oxley is overturned a Congress on the brink of introducing tough regulation of Wall Street’s financial firms might well replace the act with something even tougher. ...

Losing popularity, the Labor Party ditches its leader

LESS than a year ago Kevin Rudd rode high as one of Australia’s most successful prime ministers. Suddenly, his spectacular career has come to a crashing end. With his rating in the opinion polls sliding disastrously, and a federal election due soon, a panicked ruling Labor Party on June 24th dumped Mr Rudd as leader. They replaced him with Julia Gillard, his deputy. She will give a country once branded as a bastion of male chauvinism its first female prime minister.

As his support crumbled among Labor’s 115 federal parliamentarians, Mr Rudd had declared defiantly the previous evening that he would fight a leadership challenge from Ms Gillard. But the coup turned out to be bloodless. Faced with a humiliating defeat, when the moment came Mr Rudd stood aside. His colleagues elected Ms Gillard unanimously. Wayne Swan, the treasurer, will take over as deputy prime minister. ...

World leaders gather for G8 and G20 summit meetings

• LEADERS of the G8 group of rich countries gather in Muskoka, a Canadian holiday resort, for a two-day summit starting on Friday June 25th. The meeting overlaps with the two-day G20 summit that begins the next day in Toronto. Both get-togethers will give the opportunity to world leaders to discuss global financial regulation, reforming international financial institutions and responses to the crisis in the euro zone. The Canadian hosts have been criticised at home for the vast cost of the summit, in particular on the creation of a huge artificial lake for the media centre in a country with more real lakes than anywhere else in the world.

• ANXIETY in Britain is likely to be high as George Osborne, the country’s new chancellor (finance minister), unveils details of a tough emergency budget on Tuesday June 22nd. The new budget will set out the overall trajectory of spending, which is likely to be sharply downward. Mr Osborne’s colleagues have been making scary speeches about the parlous state of public finances. And gloomy independent forecasts for growth and the public finances from the new Office for Budgetary Responsibility suggest that hefty spending cuts and tax rises are inevitable. ...

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Reactions to a modest plan to increase the retirement age show how hard reform is in France

THE French government’s long-awaited pension reform, which was announced on June 16th, turns out to be at once symbolically bold and yet ultimately disappointing. Under a plan unveiled by Eric Woerth, the labour minister, France intends to raise the legal retirement age progressively from 60 to 62 by 2018. Since this alone will not meet the state pension-fund shortfall, the government will increase the top rate of income tax from 40% to 41% from next year, and tax capital gains, stock options and other financial income more heavily. It will also align civil servants’ pension contributions with those in the private sector by 2020. In all, the government thinks it can balance the pension fund, which currently has a €32 billion deficit, by 2018.

The symbolism of this change is clear. It was President Francois Mitterrand in the early 1980s who introduced retirement at 60 as a mark of progress, and it remains a totem for the left and the right. Martine Aubry, the Socialist Party leader, instantly called the government’s plan “irresponsible”, and says that the Socialists will reverse it if they are elected to power in 2012. Union leaders too have queued up to denounce the reforms. Francois Chereque, one union boss, called it “a provocation”. A day of strikes and protests is planned for June 24th. ...

What lies behind the violence in Kyrgyzstan

CLASHES in southern Kyrgyzstan have spiraled out of control. Thus far 118 people have been confirmed dead, a further 1,500 as injured, and tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled to neighbouring Uzbekistan. The number of those killed over the past four days are without a doubt significantly higher than these estimates suggest. Local Muslim custom requires that the dead are buried within 24 hours. Many people are burying family members immediately without registering their deaths.

Although Uzbeks make up only 15% of Kyrgyzstan’s population of 5.4m, most of them live in the southern part of the country, where they make up the majority. The Fergana Valley, where most of the killing happened, was divided arbitrarily by Stalin in the 1920s among Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As a result, the Kyrgyz Soviet republic was left with a sizeable Uzbek population, the Uzbek Soviet republic with a Tajik population, and so on. While the Soviet Union existed and the republics were part of the same country, this made little practical difference. But when the Soviet Union fell apart, these artificially created borders became final, separating newly independent states and fomenting ethnic tensions. ...

Iraq's new parliament will be in session; oil executives will be grilled by Congress

•IN IRAQ, the first session of the new parliament begins on Monday June 14th. Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Movement, known as Iraqiya, narrowly won the general election (which took place at the end of March), giving him the right to try to form a coalition. This will not be easy. Making a stable government out of the available ingredients—which include the State of Law alliance, led by the current prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; a Shia religious alliance that includes followers of a populist cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a Kurdish alliance—could take months.

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Can Japan's fifth prime minister in four years succeed where others failed?

WHEN Japan's outgoing prime minister announced his resignation this week, Tokyo's financial markets barely budged, underscoring the depressing regularity with which the country's leaders have come and gone in recent years. However the election by Japan's Diet (parliament) of Naoto Kan as prime minister on June 4th may represent a change. The past four prime ministers hailed from wealthy political dynasties, among which the premiership was almost a filial rite of passage. Mr Kan is a self-made man, ascending into politics after years toiling in citizen movements.

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BP thinks again about how to stanch the flow of oil after “top kill” fails

AFTER three days of trying, on May 29th BP gave up on its attempts to stanch the flow of oil from its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico with a procedure known as "top kill". The following day, a White House adviser described the spill as the worst in America's history.

“Top kill” depended on the company pumping large amounts of drilling mud into the blowout preventer, a set of valves which sits on the sea floor at the top of the company's MC252 well, which was drilled by the ill-fated rig, Deepwater Horizon. The idea was to push the mud down the well faster than the pressure of the rising oil and gas could push it back out of the top of the blowout preventer, eventually filling the well with a great enough weight of mud to keep the oil pressed down. To help with this the company fired various sorts of detritus into the blowout preventer, in the hope that the bits of wire and rubber thus introduced would plug the leaks at the top of the preventer and thus help to make sure the mud went down, not up. But even with these "junk shots" the company could not get the procedure to work. ...

Germany's president resigns after ill-chosen remarks about the war in Afghanistan

THE powers of the German president are more symbolic than real, but Horst Kohler’s sudden resignation from the job on Monday May 31st was nonetheless a bombshell. He quit days after critics accused him of violating the spirit of the constitution in remarks he made about German military operations abroad. His accusers “flouted the necessary respect for my office,” said a tearful Mr Kohler. His premature departure, the first by a post-war president well before the end of his term, piles additional pressure on the coalition government led by Angela Merkel, which is already beleaguered by sagging popular support and the crisis in the euro area. How she proceeds in the search for a successor will say much about how she means to manage Germany during the coalition’s three remaining years in office.

Mr Kohler, a former director of the International Monetary Fund, had been floundering for some time. As a non-politician he lacked influence in Berlin’s backrooms. Earlier presidents had made their mark by rising to historical occasions with ringing oratory. Despite his financial expertise Mr Kohler struggled to find his voice during the economic crisis. The markets had become a “monster,” he told a magazine in May. Hurled sporadically his thunderbolts fizzled. Recently, the press has been giving more coverage to infighting and resignations among his aides than to anything Mr Kohler has had to say. He remained popular but his prestige was ebbing. ...

Relations with North Korea will loom large over regional elections in South Korea

• SOUTH KOREANS will get the opportunity to judge the government’s handling of fraught relations with its northern neighbour on Wednesday June 2nd. Mayoral elections in the country’s largest cities and elections for provincial governors will prove a test of the policies of President Lee Myung-bak and a measure of his popularity. Tensions are high after North Korea severed ties with the South and threatened military action over accusations that it was responsible for sinking a South Korean naval vessel. North Korea accuses Mr Lee of fabricating the incident to bolster his party’s support in the elections.

• CLIMATE experts from around the world are set to meet in Bonn for a two-week summit starting on Monday May 31st. The German city is the latest venue for difficult talks on a new international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol in 2012. A UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December failed to produce anything beyond a non-binding political declaration. Hopes are low of significant progress that might end with a legally binding deal at the next important climate meeting in Cancun in November. Divisions remain between rich and developing countries over who should bear the costs and the biggest burden of reducing emissions. ...

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The National Security Strategy reveals a narrower view of what force can accomplish

EVERY incoming president is required to send Congress a National Security Strategy. Some of these documents are abstract and forgettable but others really do provide a clue to the future. One such was the document George W. Bush signed in 2002, which gave warning that America would act against foes seeking dangerous military technologies before such threats were fully formed. A year later the Bush administration cited precisely this doctrine to justify the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published on May 27th, has a different emphasis. Mr Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq. His document does not endorse Mr Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption. Nor, though, as the Iranians will doubtless note, is pre-emption explicitly disavowed. As a last resort, says the strategy, “the United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally,” albeit adhering to “standards that govern the use of force”. ...

BP tries to “top kill” the Deepwater Horizon leak

THE oil is coming ashore, seeping into the Louisiana marshes and washing up on Alabama beaches. Daily overflights show an oily sheen stretching over several hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico—rainbow sheen, intermittent sheen, windows of sheen. In places it clots into mousse, orange and brown. Underwater cameras give a live feed from the source, a mile below the surface: oil gushing up from the seabed in a sinuous, ceaseless heave.

It has been more than five weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, and the oil spill that resulted is very conspicuously continuing. While BP, the company responsible for the disaster, has not contradicted a government estimate that the well is spilling some 5,000 barrels a day, outside scientists have estimated that the rate is as much as ten times greater. Teams of ships have skimmed up millions of barrels of oily water, and unfurled miles of barrier boom. Tony Hayward, the company's CEO, vows to clean up “every last drop” of oil that reaches land, which is a bit unrealistic. ...

South Korea sends a firm but measured message to the North

SEOUL

LEE MYUNG-BAK, South Korea's president, has shown impressive restraint since the Cheonan, a South Korean warship, was sunk on March 26th. Now that the investigation into its cause has reached a conclusion however, he faces a dilemma. The 46 sailors who went down with their ship and the North Korean insignia found in the spent torpedo's propulsion system demand a bold response. Yet Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, is so unpredictable that it is hard to know where that might lead. ...

South Korea sets out its response to the sinking of the Cheonan

•President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea is expected to refer North Korea to the UN Security Council for its part in the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship. 46 sailors died in the incident, which took place in March. South Korea may also ban ships from the North from its waters. It needs to balance a desire for redress against the unpredictability of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader. Mr Kim has already threatened war if further sanctions are imposed on North Korea.

...

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