On the eve of his first visit to the United States in five years, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak called for a halt to Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian territories before Arab countries would be willing to normalize relations. “I explained to President Obama in Cairo that the Arab initiative offers the recognition of Israel and normalization of ties with it after, and not before, a just and lasting peace is achieved,” Mubarak told the Cairo newspaper, Al-Ahram. Mubarak signaled that some Arab countries that exchanged trade representatives with Israel in the past may consider reopening their offices in Israel if it stops settlement activity and resumes final status peace negotiations. Egyptian officials have also expressed a “sense of ease” with the new U.S. administration about Egypt’s domestic affairs. “I am not saying that we get no questions,” said the diplomat. “What I am saying is that the aggressive language in which such questions used to be couched has been abandoned.” President Mubarak will meet with President Obama on Tuesday when they will discuss the Israeli-Arab conflict and Iran’s nuclear program.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev fired the interior minister of Ingushetia after a truck packed with explosives detonated inside the gates of a police compound there, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens. The blast, which occurred near police headquarters in Nazran, Ingushetia’s largest city, is the deadliest in months in the southern Russian republic. Investigators said a Russian-made light truck rammed through a security gate at the police headquarters, sped into the facility and exploded, causing significant damage. The separatist conflict plaguing neighboring Chechnya has spread beyond its borders into Ingushetia. Last week, Ingushetia’s construction minister was shot dead in his office, and in June the Ingushetian president was seriously injured by a roadside bomb that hit his motorcade. “This act of terror could have been averted,” Medvedev said on Monday. “The police must protect the people and the police must also be able to defend themselves.”
Mexican president Felipe Calderon said he would propose a free trade agreement with Brazil, linking the two biggest economies in Latin America. Mexico, which sends 80 percent of its exports to the United States, has been hit particularly hard by the swine flu epidemic as well as the slowdown in U.S. consumer spending that has accompanied the recession. It particularly hopes to expand production by the state-run oil monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos (or Pemex, as it is known), by forming “a close collaboration” with Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras. “Trade enriches economies,” Calderon told a group of business leaders in Sao Paulo on Saturday. “I offer to put the idea [of a trade agreement] out there before different industries, and political and social groups.” The two countries comprise 70 percent of all economic activity in the region.