Six In The Morning Monday 10 June 2024

 

Blinken’s comments on truce deal ‘biased toward Israel’: Hamas

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri says the US secretary of state’s comments on the Gaza ceasefire proposal show “bias toward Israel”.

“Blinken’s speech during his visit to Egypt … offers an American cover to the holocaust conducted by the occupation in Gaza,” he told Reuters.

We reported earlier that Blinken said during a visit to Cairo: “My message to governments throughout the region, to people throughout the region, is if you want a ceasefire, press Hamas to say ‘yes’.

‘I did not want to disappear in silence’: Chechen woman livestreamed attempted abduction by her family

Liya Zaurbekova is just one of a cohort of Chechen women who have tried to escape a deeply sexist and oppressive life

Pjotr Sauer

Mon 10 Jun 2024 15.04 BST

Holed up inside a Moscow police station, Liya Zaurbekova realised that livestreaming an attempted abduction by her family might be the only path to staying alive.

In a series of public messages recorded on her phone from a toilet cubicle at the station on 16 May, the 19-year-old Chechen woman warned that if the crowd outside succeeded in taking her back to Chechnya, it could be the last time anyone would hear from her.

“I was scared. I understood that I had crossed the point of no return. I did not want to disappear in silence,” Zaurbekova recalled, in her first interview since she escaped Russia.

EU election: Germany rules out snap election after AfD gains

The far-right AfD tops the polls in eastern Germany, while the center-right CDU/CSU bloc claims overall victory in the EU elections 2024. German participation hits a post-reunification high.

Germany will not hold a snap election as demanded by the opposition despite bruising EU election results for all three parties in the ruling coalition, the spokesman for Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said.

Steffen Hebestreit rejected calls from Bavaria's state premier, Markus Söder, to follow in the footsteps of French President Emmanuel Macron, who announced parliamentary elections late on Sunday after suffering his own defeat.

"The election date is next fall as planned, and we plan to follow that through," Hebestreit said, also pointing to Germany and France's different political systems.

Insults and resistance: On the streets with Ukraine’s military recruitment officers

As the war drags on and Russia makes advances on the frontlines Ukraine is increasingly struggling to recruit enough fresh troops, with polls suggesting many of those eligible to be drafted would rather not fight. Yuriy Pikhota and Pavlo Pimakhov, two former frontline soldiers who now work as military recruitment officers say they are frequently met with insults and resistance as they patrol the streets of Kyiv to check people’s status in regards to military service.

Rival parties show different reactions to NK trash-carrying balloons

By Lee Hyo-jin

Ruling and opposition parties are responding differently to the government's approach to North Korea's trash-carrying balloons, particularly as South Korea resumes loudspeaker broadcasts in the border area as a retaliatory measure.

The conservative ruling People Power Party (PPP) supports the move, calling the broadcasts an appropriate response to threats to national security, while the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is urging the government to halt what they perceive as a "game of chicken" that could escalate into skirmishes.

As of Monday, Pyongyang has sent approximately 1,600 balloons on four occasions since May 28, with the latest release occurring on Sunday night, just hours after South Korea resumed its propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts directed toward the North.

A cartoon cat has been vexing China’s censors – now he says they are on his tail

By Tessa Wong, Asia Digital Reporter

As anti-lockdown protests flared across China’s cities in November 2022, hundreds of thousands around the world were glued to an unlikely source: a mysterious X account, fronted by a cartoon cat.

Protest footage, details about police movements, news of arrests - Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher posted a torrent of real-time updates sourced from ordinary citizens.

Little of it could be found on China’s tightly-controlled state media or internet. All of it was curated by one person, sitting in a bedroom in Italy – an art school student named Li Ying.

Mr Li has since become a vital chronicler of information deemed politically sensitive by Beijing. His X account is a window into Xi Jinping’s China where authorities’ vice-like grip on information keeps tightening. From major protests to small acts of dissent, corruption to crime, it is zealously scrubbed off the Chinese internet, only to turn up on Mr Li’s account.