Reuters World News - Blinken’s Mideast meetings, Biden-Trump poll and Israel’s troubled tech sector

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaches Turkey in his whirlwind diplomatic tour of the Middle East – after pro-Palestinian protesters tried to storm an air base holding US troops. In Israel’s near ghost town Sderot, one high tech business is carrying on. Plus, the latest Biden poll, a K-pop star questioned over drug use and other top headlines. Listen to our weekend special edition for more on Ukraine. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the protests greeting Anthony Blinken's Middle East diplomatic blitz. Donald Trump's edge over Biden in five key swing states. Inside the nearly abandoned Israeli town of Steyrott, as Israeli forces surround Gaza City. And the latest on Ukraine's counteroffensive stalemate. It's Monday, November 6th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes.

every weekday. I'm Carmel Crimmons in Dublin. Israel's military say they've surrounded Gaza City. Those are explosions heard earlier this morning. Communications and internet services have again been cut off in the enclave. The Israeli army released videos, they say, shows the opening of a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians in northern Gaza to evacuate south. In Lebanon, tensions have increased after authorities there said an Israeli airstrike on a car killed three children and their grandmother. Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at northern Israel in response. Against this backdrop of intensifying violence, the US military has taken the rare

step of announcing it sent a nuclear-powered submarine to the Middle East. A move some analysts see as a warning to Iran not to get involved. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is on a world-wind tour of the region. He's already made stops in Jordan, Iraq and the West Bank. In Baghdad, some took to the streets to protest against his visit. Blinkins in Turkey today, the trip coming hours after hundreds of people at a pro-Palestinian protest tried to storm an air base housing U.S. troops

in the south of the country. Simon Lewis is an anchorer. This has been a very intense round of shuttle diplomacy for Blinken, right? Yeah, this is the second trip to the region, and this time he crossed over into the occupied West Bank, crossing through Israeli checkpoints to go and meet Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, really to hear from the Palestinian leader and try to reassure him that the US is doing what it can

to urge Israel to use restraint. Then another unannounced trip, secretly flying into Baghdad last night, really trying to make sure that the conflict in Gaza doesn't spread around the region. The US wants Israel to show more restraint in its campaign in Gaza, and on that, the Israelis really aren't budging. Arab leaders want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but Blinken pushed back on that. It's our view that a ceasefire now would simply leave Hamas in place,

able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7th. How was that received? Well, we had a pretty tense press conference on Saturday in Amman where the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan both pretty stern, said, you've got to call for a ceasefire now. The images that we're seeing from Gaza are sort of outraging populations in the region. Blinken, he pushed back on this and basically said ceasefire now is going to allow Hamas to regroup and resupply. So basically, it's not the time to call for that. Blinken spoke with the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas about

potentially that organization playing a role in a post-Hamas Gaza. How much of this trip has been about preparing for that post-conflict future. I think it's a really tricky conversation that Blinken is trying to have in the region here in Amman with the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers. They basically said, this is not the time to start talking about what happens next in Gaza. We've got to address the humanitarian crisis that's happening. But in these conversations, we know that they are talking about what's going to happen when presumably Israel routes Hamas, as they're trying to do, and who's going to run the Gaza Strip,

which is a big open question at the moment. Joe Biden is trailing Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in five of the six most important battleground states, a year ahead of the 2024 election. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Biden ahead in Wisconsin. That's according to polls conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Russian drone attacks in Odessa

have left at least five people injured and damaged one of the city's main art galleries. Early this morning, authorities were sweeping up the debris from smashed windows. The attack comes after Russia and Ukraine gave clashing accounts about what's happening along the front lines in the Zaporizia region. Moscow says it stopped Keeves counteroffensive and Ukraine's army saying it keeps pressing on. Mike Collette White has been following the latest. So Mike, what do we know so far about what's going on in the front lines? Well, the Zaporizier region is the southern front, which is,

is where Ukraine has concentrated most of his efforts during the counter-offensive. And of late, the fighting has been heavy in places, but there hasn't really been much movement in either direction, north or south. So the Russians and the Ukrainians are slugging it out, and neither side is really able to claim decisive victories at this stage. And it all speaks to how Ukraine's much-vaunted counter-offensive, which it hoped would rest back the initiative in the war, has ground into a bloody stalemate.

For more in the war in Ukraine, listen to our special edition of the podcast published over the weekend. You can find a link to it in the description of today's pod. Police in South Korea are questioning K-pop star G Dragon over allegations of illegal drug use. The investigation against the former Big Bang frontman is the latest in a string of high-profile drugs cases against South Korean artists.

A caravan of at least hundreds of migrants has left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, heading for the US border. The smaller caravan plans to join a larger one of thousands, currently stopped further north in the town of Huixla. Opium poppy production in Afghanistan has plummeted since a Taliban ban last year. The drop could help fight the illicit trade of the drug, but a UN report said it could also hurt the local economy, where farmers rely on the poppy trade for their livelihood.

The town of Steyrott, overlooking the Gaza Strip, was on the front line of Hamas's deadly rampage into Israel on October 7th. The border town is now largely abandoned, except for some tech and business owners determined to carry on. Jonathan Saul visited one high-tech factory. One businessman I met was cleaning up because his business had been hit by a rocket attack, but luckily for him it hit a water pipe,

which meant that the missile itself didn't blow up the plant. So instead of fire, the water, take out a fire and everything here was, it was like a jacuzzi. I was wet like hell trying to close the water, but it took a few hours. I also met with a startup high-tech company doing cutting-edge research into batteries for e-veh vehicles and they had stilof them for business. They were able to be up and running again a week after the attacks on October 7th. What was interesting about that company was that I asked them the question whether their investors

were starting to get nervous about the situation here. But they told me that their investors were actually quite buoyant and bullish and they had full faith and confidence in the project. Israel's entire tech sector has been hit hard. Can you give us a sense of how nervous investors are in that industry? Yeah, so Sterot is a very small microcosm of Israel's tech sector. The idea with Sterot was that they wanted to create a sort of smaller hub. in the south of the country. Israel's high-tech center, the lifeblood, is in Tel Aviv and Herzlir, both coastal cities. But the feeling at the moment is one of increasing concern and alarm with raising money. One of the reasons being is that a number of the workers within the industry have been

drafted. Some estimates go as far as 15% of all that high-tech sector workers are currently in military service. There was a letter that was sent by a senior official with Microsoft, of Israel's R&D Center. He's censored the head of the National Security Council. His concerns are very much warning about the impact of the war and the toll it was taking upon the high-tech sector and the need to ensure that there's stability, if not control and encouragement for the high-tech sector,

being that it's very much the kind of driving house and the power house for Israel's economy in many ways. The country has really suffered a whole year of turmoil. If we rewind before the attack of October 7 events that took place, the country faced months of turmoil related to the judicial review. That in itself was a flashpoint and a trigger for a lot of the concerns within the high-tech sector about whether big investors would start relocating their R&D projects and plants outside of Israel to other hubs such as Singapore or other potential investment places to establish their operations and look for startups to develop. Plenty of forward-looking momentum driving markets today. Hopes of rate cuts in the United States and Europe next year are boosting equities. Investors are betting the Fed is done raising rates and will ease them in June.

And their wageering the ECB will cut in April. Signs the US labour market is cooling is driving this sentiment. That's it for today's episode. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes, every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your Facebook. favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.