Sunday Roundup - November 2, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media.  Today we look at Ukraine, recent Latin American elections, the Jerusalem protests, Hong Kong, Ebola, and, in brief, the U.S. midterm elections.

Ukraine
On October 26. parliamentary elections were held in the parts of Ukraine controlled by Kiev's troops. It was a victory for the pro-European parties.  With 98.02 percent of ballots having been counted, Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party is ahead of its rivals, with 22.16 percent. President Petro Poroshenko's party is only slightly behind, with 21.82 percent.  The Opposition Bloc, which campaigns for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis, has received 9.36 percent, mostly from voters in southeast Ukraine – Kharkov, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk, and Donetsk Region – where the balance has shifted away from the pro-EU trend, which is widely supported in other regions....Most of the east is still under rebel control. Voting did not take place there, as the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk plan to hold their own parliamentary elections on November 2. [Russia Times, Oct. 29]  The separatist eastern region of the country, known as "Donboss", will be holding its own elections on Sunday November 2 in spite of the ongoing skirmishes and shelling occurring in violation of the ceasefire.  Russia is backing a plan by separatists in eastern Ukraine to hold a vote in areas under their control ostensibly as part of a deal with Kiev to allow limited self-rule in the region. The vote, set for Nov. 2 would come days after Ukrainian elections that saw pro-Western parties allied with President Petro Poroshenko sweep to power.  But the Ukrainian government says the elections come too early and has urged Russia to put pressure on the rebels it backs to hold off. Western governments have also opposed the poll. [NPR, October 28] Finally, Ukraine, Russia and the European Union signed a deal on Thursday on the resumption of Russian natural gas supplies to Ukraine for winter after several months of delay during the conflict in Ukraine....Talks had been broken off in the early hours as Moscow sought more guarantees from the EU that it would help Ukraine pay for its natural gas. They resumed on Thursday evening before reaching a deal....European energy commissioner Günther Oettinger...said the $4.6bn deal should extend to the spring and that it was “perhaps first glimmer of a relaxation in the relations between neighbours.” [The Guardian. Oct. 30]

Bolivia and Brazil Elections
Presidential elections were held in Bolivia and Brazil. The leftist incumbents won both elections.

On October 12, Bolivian voters returned Evo Morales for a third term with 61.4% of the vote - more than 35 points ahead of his nearest rival.  President Morales told cheering supporters at the presidential palace in La Paz that "this win is a triumph for anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists". He dedicated "this triumph" to the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and Venezuela's late president, Hugo Chavez.  Mr Morales has overseen strong economic growth since taking office in 2006, using Bolivia's commodity wealth to reduce poverty levels. [BBC News, October 13]

Supporters of Brazil's President and Workers' Party (PT) presidential candidate
Dilma Rousseff react to first results of the Brazil general elections in Porto Alegre, October 26, 2014. 
CREDIT: REUTERS/PAULO WHITAKER

The October 26 election in Brazil, the world's seventh largest economy, was much closer.  Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff narrowly won re-election on Sunday after convincing voters that her party's strong record of reducing poverty over the last 12 years was more important than a recent economic slump.  After one of the closest, most divisive campaigns in Brazil in decades, Rousseff won 51.6 percent of votes in a runoff against centrist opposition leader Aecio Neves, who won 48.4 percent....The result means another four years in power for the Workers' Party, which since 2003 has virtually transformed Brazil - lifting 40 million from poverty, reducing unemployment to record lows and making big inroads against hunger in what remains one of the world's most unequal countries. [Reuters, Oct. 26]

East Jerusalem Protests

"I urge you to pray so that the Holy City, dear to Jews, Christians and Muslims, which has experienced several tensions in these days, may be more and more a symbol and a precursor of the peace that God wishes for the entire human family."

- Pope Francis, All Saints Day (November 1) in Jerusalem

Israel reopened the al Aqsa mosque to Muslim men over 50 for Friday prayers after the "Day of Rage" protests, but tensions in East Jerusalem continue.  The closing of the mosque was prompted by the wounding of an Israeli extremist on Wednesday.  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said through his spokesman that the closure of al Aqsa combined with other dangerous escalations by Israel were "tantamount to a declaration of war."  Abbas has requested that US Secretary of State Kerry get involved in order to stop Israeli settlement projects in the city, which, in his view, will cause a dangerous escalation and continue the cycle of violence, anger and radicalization in the area.

Palestinian protester stands near burning tires
during clashes with Israeli police in East Jerusalem
Photo is by Ammar Awad/Reuters and appeared in The Guardian 

The Netanyahu government had announced that it will go ahead with the construction of 1,000 settler units in East Jerusalem despite widespread condemnation of the action.  As reported in The Guardian on October 27, The Israeli government is to advance construction plans for 1,000 housing units to be built in parts of Jerusalem that Palestinians demand for their future state.  The move, revealed by the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,, is the first in what is expected to be a series of announcements .... on new settlement construction work in East Jerusalem and on the occupied West Bank.  It comes despite a warning from the US this month that continued construction would “poison the atmosphere” and distance Israel from even its closest allies...The announcement was immediately condemned by the finance minister, Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party, who warned that it would damage US-Israeli relations, which are already at a low ebb. Last week, the White House refused the Israeli defence minister’s requests to meet several top national security aides. 

Al Jazeera traces the escalating tensions back to this summer:  Tensions in Jerusalem had risen to a boiling point over the summer, when Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and burned alive by Israelis, who said they were avenging the murder of three Israeli teenagers near Hebron.  Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem erupted in protests, prompting an Israeli crackdown. At the same time, angry crowds of Israelis marched through the city’s streets demanding revenge.  At least 760 Palestinians, including 260 children, were arrested in the security sweeps that followed, according to the Israeli news outlet Haaretz. “The mass arrests in Jerusalem … the settlers’ invasion of Arab neighborhoods with the support of the government and courts … all this will have a price,” Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz on Thursday. Between 1967 and 2013, he wrote, Israel revoked the residence status — or the identification card that allows Palestinians to live in East Jerusalem — of over 14,000 Palestinians, “with strange claims that don’t apply to any of its Jewish residents. Isn’t that apartheid?”

Hong Kong
The Hong Kong protests have been pushed off the front page but they are still going on.  Peter Thal Larsen in an October 28 op-ed blog for Reuters writes of the "polite impasse" on the streets of Hong Kong:  The three-lane highway that passes in front of Hong Kong’s central government buildings has been transformed into an impromptu city-centre campsite. Wandering between the hundreds of numbered, multicoloured tents on Harcourt Road feels more like attending a nerdy music festival than a hotbed of political agitation....Hong Kong’s large financial district has mostly continued to operate as normal....The protesters have...defied predictions that they would quickly lose interest. The government’s clumsy and sometimes heavy-handed attempts to end the protests have helped. The use of tear gas; the decision to call and then cancel talks with student leaders; the policemen caught on film beating up a handcuffed protester – all have spurred crowds to return to the streets.  The other surprise is that China has not ordered a crackdown. ...Beijing’s relative tolerance does not mean it is prepared to meet the movement’s requests, however. China has stuck to the proposed system for selecting Hong Kong’s chief executive that ignited the protests in the first place. 

Ebola
As the US and Canada sort out protective gear, medical procedures, quarantines, and visas to reduce the likelihood of Ebola infections here, West Africa's battle against the epidemic continues in the face of a massive overload of their medical systems.  The World Health Organization (WHO) published figures on Friday, October 31, showing 4,951 people have died of Ebola out of a total of 13,567 reported cases.  WHO acknowledges that the official figures are under-reported.  Ebola has wiped out whole villages in Sierra Leone and may have caused many more deaths than the nearly 5,000 official global toll, a senior coordinator of the medical aid group MSF [Doctors Without Borders] said Friday. "The WHO says there is a correction factor of 2.5, so maybe it is 2.5 times higher and maybe that is not far from the truth. It could be 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000," said [Rony] Zachariah.  "You have one nurse for 10,000 people and then you lose 10, 11, 12 nurses. How is the health system going to work?"  [AFP, Nov. 1]

Links/In Brief - The US Midterm Elections
The US midterm elections will be held Tuesday, November 4.  Control of the US Senate is up for grabs and, with it, control of the Federal courts and ambassadorial nominations.  Republicans have held up confirmation of Obama nominations to these posts by a variety of procedural motions in spite of the filibuster reform of November 2013.

The Guardian 's take on the election is given in an October 31 article: Republicans are entering the final stretch of the midterm election campaign convinced they stand poised to retake control of the Senate and possibly even extend their majority in the House of Representatives to the largest enjoyed by the party since 1928.  For me, this is an ominous thought.  The last time the Republicans held that large a majority in the House, they presided over the Great Depression.

If, as many predict, the Republicans do take control of the Senate for the next session of Congress, Democrats will make a major push to confirm as many of the 156 pending nominations as they can in the lame duck session. [Daily Kos, Oct. 23]

Republican dirty tricks and voter suppression continue unabated: Grimes Files for Injunction Against McConnell for Illegal Voter Suppression/Intimidation [Daily Kos, Oct 31]

How can Democrats hold the Senate? [The Left Bank Cafe, Oct. 6]

The World Series, Halloween, and the Election [The Left Bank Cafe, Oct. 30]