International
Argentina govt loses Congress majority, seeks opposition dialogue

AFP
Argentina’s center-left President Alberto Fernandez called for dialogue with the opposition after Sunday’s midterm parliamentary elections, with projections showing his governing coalition has lost control of Congress.
Ahead of the election, there was widespread discontent over the state of the economy, which has been in recession since 2018 and was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Having already been in the minority in the Chamber of Deputies — the lower house — Fernandez’s Frente de Todos (Everyone’s Front) coalition looked set to drop from 41 to 35 seats in the 72-member Senate, based on projections with over 90 percent of votes counted.
“If the numbers are confirmed, effectively we’ve lost the quorum in the Senate,” a government source told AFP.
This would be the first time since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983 that Peronism — a leftist movement based on former president Juan Peron that now covers a broad spectrum of political leanings — would not have a majority in the Senate.
Fernandez will now likely be forced to make concessions to the opposition during the last two years of his mandate in order to pass laws or make key appointments, including to the judiciary.
“We need to prioritize national agreements if we want to resolve the challenges we face,” said Fernandez, adding that he would approach opposition groups to try to find common ground.
“An opposition that is responsible and open to dialogue is a patriotic opposition.”
Nearly half the seats in the Chamber of Deputies were up for grabs, as well as a third of Senate seats, in Sunday’s vote.
Interior Minister Wado de Pedro said turnout in the compulsory election was between 71 and 72 percent.
– ‘Difficulty ahead’ –
Fernandez had been on the defensive since the Frente suffered a bruising defeat in September’s primaries, picking up just 33 percent of the vote compared with 37 percent for the main opposition group Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change), led by Fernandez’s predecessor Mauricio Macri.
“These next two years are going to be difficult,” Macri said Sunday, while assuring voters that his coalition would “act with great responsibility.”
Fernandez “will have to negotiate law by law,” said Raul Aragon, political scientist at the National University of La Matanza.
He predicted the opposition would be open to talks though.
“It won’t serve them to not engage in dialogue, and appear anti-democratic” before the presidential elections in 2023, Aragon said.
Since the primaries, the government had been in damage limitation mode, announcing last month a deal with the private sector to freeze prices on more than 1,500 basic goods following street protests demanding greater food subsidies.
It has also increased the minimum wage and family allowances.
The government’s supporters have been forced to keep a low profile during the long pandemic lockdowns.
But pro-government trade unions and social organizations recently announced they would march in support of Fernandez on Wednesday, regardless of the election results.
– IMF debt looms –
Argentina’s GDP dropped 9.9 percent last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The country has one of the world’s highest inflation rates, at 40 percent so far this year, and a poverty rate of 42 percent for a population of 45 million.
“I fear for the economy,” pastry worker Oscar Navarro told AFP on Sunday, without revealing his vote.
“Salaries are not sufficient. Whoever wins, it will take a long time for the country to recover.”
The government is also in the midst of a tricky renegotiation with the International Monetary Fund over the repayment of a $44 billion debt, originally secured by the Macri government in 2018.
“In this new stage, we will deepen our efforts to secure a sustainable deal with the IMF,” said Fernandez.
He said the country needed to get past the “uncertainties that come with unsustainable debt,” while creating jobs and reducing inflation.
If Fernandez does not manage to reach a new repayment schedule, Argentina will have to repay $19 billion in 2022 and as much again in 2023.
International
China shows at the UN its “condemnation” of Israel for the “violation of Iran’s sovereignty”

The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, showed the “condemnation” of his country against the “violation of the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Iran” after the air attack launched by Israel against multiple targets in that country, the official newspaper Diario del Pueblo reports this Saturday.
That media echoes Fu’s speech to the UN Security Council on Friday, in which he demanded that Israel “immediately stop all its military actions.”
“China (…) opposes the expansion of conflicts, and is deeply concerned about the serious consequences that may arise from Israel’s actions. The intensification of regional tensions does not interest any of the parties involved,” said the Chinese emissary.
Beijing called on Tel Aviv and Tehran to “resolve their disputes through political and diplomatic means, and maintain peace and stability at the regional level jointly.”
In Fu’s view, the Israeli attack will have a “negative impact” on the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program: “China has always been committed to the peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and consultations, and opposes the use of force, illegal unilateral sanctions and armed attacks on peaceful nuclear facilities.”
This Friday, China had already expressed its willingness to “play a constructive role” to curb the escalation of tensions and facilitate conciliation, in line with its traditional position of active neutrality in the region’s conflicts.
The Israeli attack, which according to Tehran caused dozens of deaths, including senior military commanders and at least six nuclear scientists, targeted key facilities such as the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Numerous civilian casualties were also reported.
Israel justified the offensive by claiming that the Iranian regime is secretly developing a program to manufacture nuclear weapons.
For his part, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, promised a “severe response” and assured that the attack would reveal the “evil nature” of Israel.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also expressed concern about the bombing, at a time when Iran and the US The United States is holding talks about the Iranian nuclear program.
International
Donald Trump’s government pauses its program of indiscriminate raides against migrants

The government of US President Donald Trump has decided to pause its campaign of discretionary roundings against migrants in certain areas due to its apparent concern about the growing unpopularity of these methods, according to The New York Times newspaper on Friday.
According to an email to which the newspaper has had access and the confirmation of US officials, the Executive has ordered the Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) to pause the beatings that affect the agricultural industry and the hospitality industry.
The spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed in a statement that “the president’s instructions” will be obeyed and the portfolio will also continue to “work to get the worst illegal foreign criminals out of the streets of the United States.”
The decision points out that this campaign of discretionary arrests to try to deport large-scale immigrants is harming industries and electoral constituencies whose support Trump wants to retain for next year’s legislative elections.
The new instructions were transmitted to ICE in an email sent last Thursday asking that “all investigations/law enforcement operations be suspended in work centers in the agricultural sector (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and hotels.”
These new guidelines come in turn after more than a week of intense protests in Los Angeles against this immigration policy and that Trump himself admitted that the raids seem to be affecting the agricultural sector, which in states like California, where beatings have intensified, depend almost exclusively on immigrant labor.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has implemented an aggressive policy of hard hand against immigration and as a sample of his Cabinet officials recently held a meeting with the ICE leadership to order them to carry out 3,000 arrests a day, a mandate that seems to be behind the intensification of the raids.
International
Trump says he knew “everything” about the attack on Iran and assures that the dialogue remains open

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington “known everything” about the Israeli attack on Iran and that the dialogue on Tehran’s nuclear program “is not dead.”
“We knew everything and I tried to avoid Iran all this humiliation and death. I tried hard to avoid it because I would have loved to see an agreement,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters.
The US president insisted on what he wrote today about the attack on social networks, where he said he gave an ultimatum of 60 days to Tehran to reach an agreement.
“We knew practically everything. We knew enough to give Iran 60 days to reach an agreement and today it is already 61 days,” he explained in the interview, in which he said he did not know what the current situation of the Iranian nuclear program is after the attack launched by Israel, which also ended the lives of key military leaders of the Persian country.
Regarding the dialogue between the US and Iran about the nuclear program of the ayatollahs, Trump assured that “he is not dead”, that “an agreement is still possible” and also recalled that on Sunday a sixth round of dialogue is scheduled in Muscat (Oman) that they consider is now in the air.
“We have a meeting with them on Sunday. Now, I’m not sure if that meeting will take place, but we have a meeting with them on Sunday,” he said.
The United States and Iran have held five rounds of talks on the Iranian nuclear program since April, with Washington demanding that Tehran discard its capabilities both to manufacture an atomic bomb and to enrich uranium, something that the ayatollahs considered unacceptable.
Both Israel and Trump himself had warned of possible preventive attacks on the Persian country due to this refusal by Iran.
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