Monday briefing: US urges new hostage talks

A White House official goes to the Middle East for hostage talks

President Biden's Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk will travel to Egypt and Qatar to meet with top leaders about a deal for the release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a temporary pause in fighting.

Here's the latest.

Egypt and Qatar helped broker a ceasefire in November, with Hamas freeing more than 100 people from captivity. The hope is that another similar deal can be struck. But US officials have said the release of new hostages is complicated by Hamas's apparent desire for a permanent ceasefire.

McGurk's trip comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again said he would not meet Hamas' demands for a withdrawal of Israeli forces in exchange for the release of hostages. “Let it be clear: I completely reject the surrender terms of the Hamas monsters,” Netanyahu said yesterday.

Netanyahu again rejected the idea of ​​establishing a Palestinian state, just a day after President Biden raised the possibility of a disarmed Palestinian nation. Biden has argued that some kind of two-state solution is the only viable solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position most American and European leaders have taken in recent history.

Is North Korea really planning to attack?

On January 5, North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells into the waters near South Korea's border islands. Last week the country said the South was an “enemy state” that it would subjugate through nuclear war. On Friday it said it had tested an underwater nuclear drone to repel US Navy fleets. There is great disagreement over the meaning of this latest drumbeat of threats.

Several analysts say this is an indication that Kim Jong Un, the North's leader, has become disillusioned with diplomatic engagement with the West, and some point to the possibility that the country is planning an attack on the South.

Others are more skeptical. Park Won-gon, a North Korea expert at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, thinks it is more likely that Kim wants to convince the North's enemies that he could start a war, “because that could lead to involvement and possible concessions, such as easing sanctions.”

China, which is bound by treaty to provide assistance if the North were attacked, could also be a target of Kim's tactics. By ratcheting up tensions, says John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, Kim can get a sense of what Xi Jinping is “willing to do to appease him.”

Dangerous doubts are growing in Taiwan

As China asserts its claim to Taiwan with greater force, the island nation is a bundle of contradictions and doubts.

As the Taiwanese people watch the American impasse over military aid to Ukraine and Israel — and try to imagine what this would actually mean for them in a crisis — their trust in America plummets. Recent polls showed that only 34 percent of respondents see the US as trustworthy, down from 45 percent in 2021. Surveys of online discussions show growing concerns that the world's oldest democracy will lack the strength or will to help.

But that distrust could make it easier for the island to be swallowed up.

The New New World: For Chinese people visiting Taiwan, seeing the recent elections on the island aroused both jealousy and tears.

A year ago, European botanists who traveled to Borneo, the world's third largest island, “discovered” a species of palm that blooms underground, an extremely rare oddity.

But while the plant may have been new to them, that was not the case for the indigenous groups living there. And it's not hard to find: the plant, pinanga subterranea, grows all over the land Island.

Lives lived: Robert Whitman, a pioneer in the field of performance and multimedia art, died on Friday at the age of 88.

One tennis prodigy after another

Until recently, no one had ever heard of Mirra Andreeva; now she's all anyone talks about. At the age of 16, she performed a miracle every other day as she takes over the Australian Open.

She recently breezed past Ons Jabeur, a three-time Grand Slam finalist for Tunisia and Andreeva's female tennis idol, and on Friday she somehow managed to climb out of a 5-1 hole to beat France's Diane Parry in the decisive tiebreak.

Andreeva comes from a small town in Siberia – not known as a bastion of the sport she loves. But her mother's fascination with tennis and a move to Cannes opened up the sport to her. As she juggles fame at court with her third year of online high school, she says this life suits her just fine.

“I like being here,” she said. “I like to travel all over the world. I'm okay with what's happening.”

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