The United States on Thursday urged Israel not to aggravate the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, where the Jewish state has scaled down its energy supply as it pursues rocket launchers in the territory.
   ‘We understand Israel’s right to defend itself but we do not think that action should be taken that would infringe upon or worsen the humanitarian situation for the civilian population in Gaza,’ said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
   ‘I am sure we will continue to convey that position to them.’
   Speaking in Israel, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, vowed that ‘if the rocket fire from Gaza continues, we will intensify our operations and strikes against the other side, until a solution is found.’
   Israel has kept Gaza under effective lockdown since June 2007 following the territory’s takeover by the Islamist movement Hamas.
   Last month, Israel tightened its long-running blockade on Gaza, which was crippled by a sharp drop in fuel and electrical supplies, but the blockade was eased several days later after an intervention by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, with Israeli authorities.
   Israel began cutting electrical power to the Gaza Strip as part of a plan to sever economic ties with the territory, an Israeli defence official said on Friday, reports Reuters/bdnews24.com
   It is the latest in a series of Israeli steps to increase pressure on Gaza, ruled by the Hamas Islamists since June and the source of repeated rocket attacks into the Jewish state.
   A spokesman for the defence minister, Ehud Barak, said Israel cut 5 per cent of electricity late on Thursday on one of 10 high-power lines that supply the Gaza Strip.
   The reduction will, at this point, translate to less than 1 per cent of the 124 megawatts Israel supplies for the entire coastal territory, he said.
   ‘This is a signal to the Palestinians that we see their conduct in Gaza and that we want to continue the disengagement process. I hope they will focus their effort on getting new sources of energy instead of developing ... rockets,’ spokesman Shlomo Dror said.
   Critics accuse Israel of imposing a blockade that amounts to ‘collective punishment’ of the population after it cut fuel to Gaza’s main power plant last month, leading to blackouts.
   The Israeli deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, said Israel is ‘trying to reduce the Gaza Strip’s dependence on Israel in many fields ... the High Court ruled that we are acting in a correct and appropriate manner.’
   Israel, which occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, pulled troops and settlers out in 2005 but still controls its northern and eastern borders, airspace and coastal waters.
   Apart from Israel’s 124 megawatts, a local power station in Gaza City produces 64 megawatts and Egypt supplies 17 megawatts, Israel’s defence ministry said. Asked to comment, US State Dept spokesman Tom Casey said he was not familiar with the Israeli decision.
   ‘We understand Israel’s right to defend itself, but we do not think that actions should be taken that would infringe upon or worsen the humanitarian situation for the civilian population in Gaza,’ he added

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad said on Thursday a lasting peace accord with Israel was unlikely in 2008 despite renewed diplomatic efforts to resolve the long-running conflict.
   In an interview with Reuters in the Texas capital, Austin, where he is on a private visit, he highlighted the lack of progress on the issue of Israeli settlements and military incursions into the West Bank as among the chief obstacles in the ‘road map’ to peace and Palestinian statehood.
   ‘I do not believe though that the final resolution ... will be complete in the course of this year. I don’t think that is likely,’ Fayyad said.
   On a trip to the Middle East last month, the US president, George W Bush, said he believed a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians would be signed before he leaves office in January 2009.
   The US government will assess and judge whether Israel and the Palestinians are meeting their obligations under the 2003 road map as part of a push for a Palestinian statehood agreement before Bush leaves office.
   In the interview, Fayyad said: ‘The short-term track is not moving as well as it needs to for the political process, for negotiations. In particular, the lack of an adequately firm commitment with regard to settlements,’ he said.
   Israel has yet to fulfil its road map commitments to halt Jewish settlement activity and to uproot outposts built without government permission in the occupied West Bank.
   Israeli officials have said Palestinians have a long way to go to meet their security obligations under the road map.

US intelligence chiefs said Thursday they are seeing some signs that public opinion in the Muslim world is turning against al-Qaeda.
   They cited indications that donations to al-Qaeda are falling off, unusual criticism of the group by other Muslim fundamentalists, and efforts by al-Qaeda’s leadership to reach out to the umma, the body of Muslim believers.
   The shifting attitudes come despite other evidence that al-Qaeda has gained strength in its safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas and are improving their ability to launch attacks in the west.
   ‘We don’t know if we’ve reached a tipping point yet. That’s something were trying to get a focus on to get a feel for it,’ said Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.
   But he said lawmakers, ‘There are a number of positive signs.’
   McConnell pointed to the turnabout in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province as the most dramatic example of sunnis repudiating an al-Qaeda affiliate with a resulting decline in sectarian violence.
   Saudi Arabia’s forceful response to extremist attacks in 2003 also has exerted pressure on al-Qaeda and on the flow of donations to it from wealthy Arabs, he said.
   ‘What we’ve noticed in the past year and two months is that al-Qaeda has had difficulty in raising funds and sustaining itself,’ McConnell said.
   General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, acknowledged that Muslim attitudes toward al-Qaeda were ‘hard to measure.’
   But he pointed to a jihadist web site’s open invitation of questions for Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two, as a possible sign that its leaders are worried about eroding public support in the Muslim world.
   ‘To have people like bin Laden and Zawahiri governing by fiat as to what true Islam is, now being forced into a rather open dialogue with the umma, the body of believers, I think it is a remarkable step, and I don’t think reflective of overconfidence on the part of al-Qaeda now,’ Hayden said.
   McConnell said US intelligence has noted that several Salafist groups, a fundamentalist Muslim branch that emulates Mohammed and his early followers, have recently denounced al-Qaeda’s actions.
   ‘So that is another sign for us that the billion Muslims that practice their faith as good citizens are not for al-Qaeda and that it’s the extremist branch,’ he said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo government has handed over a former militia chief accused of war crimes including murder, enforcing sexual slavery and pillaging villages to the International Criminal Court, officials said.
   Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, former head of the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, who is accused of carrying out a village massacre in 2003 in the northeast region of Ituri, was expected in The Hague on Thursday, the ICC said.
   He was arrested in Kinshasa Wednesday and put on a plane to the Netherlands, according to a statement released by the DR Congo justice minister, Symphorien Mutombo Bakafwa.
   ‘The date of Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui’s first hearing will be announced shortly,’ the ICC said.
   The court said a pre-trial chamber found ‘that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, as the highest ranking FNI commander, played an essential role in designing and implementing an indiscriminate attack against the village of Bogoro, in the territory of Ituri, on or around 24 February 2003.
   ‘The chamber also found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that during and after the attack on the village of Bogoro against civilians, primarily of Hema ethnicity, with the active participation of children under the age of fifteen years, several criminal acts were committed.’
   The ICC statement cited ‘the murder of about 200 civilians; causing serious bodily harm to civilians; arresting, threatening with weapons and imprisoning civilians in a room filled with corpses; pillaging; sexual enslavement of several women and girls.’
   The attack was agreed by Ngudjolo and other senior FNI and FRPI (Patriotic Resistance Force in Ituri) military commanders, the ICC prosecutor charged. The arrest warrant lists nine counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
   Ngudjolo is the third person in the custody of the ICC. In October, the Congolese authorities sent Germain Katanga, a Congolese national and alleged commander of the FRPI, to the court.
   Katanga is currently charged as a co-perpetrator of the crimes allegedly committed during the joint FNI and FRPI attack on Bogoro.
   In March 2006, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese national and alleged founder and leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots, was also sent to The Hague.
   The ICC prosecutor launched investigations in DR Congo in June 2004 after the Congolese government referred the situation in the country to the court, and Lubanga and Katanga were arrested in Kinshasa in March 2005.

The head of the CIA said Thursday it is uncertain whether the use of waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning widely condemned as torture, would be lawful if used on Friday against al-Qaeda detainees.
   General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, said the legal landscape has changed since the technique was used nearly five years ago in interrogations of three top al-Qaeda detainees.
   ‘It’s not a technique that I’ve asked for, it’s not included in the current program,’ Hayden said members of the House Intelligence Committee.
   ‘And in my own view, and the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that that technique would be considered lawful under current statute,’ he said.
   Hayden’s comments contradicted the White House which earlier this week defended the practice and said it could be used again in a situation where an attack was believed to be imminent.
   Attorney General Michael Mukasy, meanwhile, said the Justice Department would not investigate the earlier use of waterboarding as a potential crime.
   He said its use by the CIA ‘cannot possibly be the subject of a criminal, a Justice Department investigation, because that would mean that the same department that authorised the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice.’
   Hayden publicly admitted to the CIA’s use of waterboarding for the first time on Tuesday in testimony before a senate committee.

On the shores of lake Nahuel Huapi, in the wild mountains of Argentina’s Patagonia, live some of the world’s most ancient trees.
   Known in Spanish as the alerce, the Patagonian cypress grows extremely slowly, but can reach heights over 50 metres (165 feet) and live for 2,000 years or more, putting some of them among the oldest living things on earth.
   For scientists who come from around the world to study them, the alerces give an exciting snapshot of years past.
   Argentine geoscientist Ricardo Villalba, a contributor to the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations report on climate change last year, studies what the ancient trees say about changing weather patterns.
   Like other trees, alerces form a new layer of wood under their bark every year. So samples taken straight through the trunk can help gauge what the weather was like in each year of the tree’s life.
   ‘This has allowed us to see that in some sectors of Patagonia, the year 1998 was the hottest in the last 400 years,’ Villalba said during a recent expedition.
   ‘The marked tendencies that have occurred over the last few decades have no precedent in the last 400 or 500 years, which is as far as the registers in Patagonia have permitted us to analyze up until now.’
   The tree rings show that temperatures in the 20th Century were ‘anomalously warm’ across the southern Andes. At their worst, mean temperatures over the last century went up 0.86 degree Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) when compared to temperatures in the previous 260 years.
   At the nearby Puerto Blest Biological Research Station, Villalba has been able to compare his results with those of other leading scientists.
   Evidence from tree rings is what scientists call proxy data, meaning they know the data is not exact but if it corroborates other proxy data — like evidence of glacier retreat — it can be used to draw real conclusions. The scientists have also been able to use their proxy data to test computer models used for predicting climate changes in the future.
   ‘In this part of the world there is a decrease in precipitation in the last decade and a very marked increase in temperature, which is entirely what the computer models predict for global change,’ said researcher Brian Luckman of the University of Western Ontario and the InterAmerican Research Institute.

Tanzania’s president dissolved the cabinet Thursday after accepting the resignation of his prime minister and two cabinet ministers over a corruption scandal.
   The prime minister, Edward Lowassa, said parliament he felt forced to step aside after his credibility was tarnished by a report into a deal signed between the government and the Texas-based firm Richmond for emergency power supply.
   ‘Because I have been linked to this scandal, I have decided to write to the president asking to be relieved of my duties,’ the premier said lawmakers, during a session of the Dodoma-based parliament broadcast live on television.
   The energy minister, Nazir Karamagi, and the minister for East African Cooperation, Ibrahim Msabaha, who held the energy portfolio until October 2006, also tendered their resignation.

Nepal’s police have arrested an Indian man suspected of being the mastermind of an illegal kidney transplant racket in India, a top force official said.
   The racket was uncovered and made headlines in India last month in the booming IT city of Gurgaon outside New Delhi, with reports that hundreds of poor labourers may have been duped or forced into donating organs to wealthy clients.
   The 40-year-old Amit Kumar was arrested at a resort in Chitwan National Park, 80 km southwest of Kathmandu on Thursday evening. Chitwan is popular among foreign tourists for jungle safaris and wildlife watching.
   ‘He was sitting in the lobby of the hotel from where we arrested him,’ police officer Kiran Gautam said from Hetauda, the biggest town in the region.
   ‘He did not resist being arrested,’ Gautam said.
   The case was one of the largest transplant rackets reported in India in recent years and has led to calls for the government to tighten the regulation of kidney transplants to stop backstreet operations.
   Kidney failure has become more common in rich countries, often because of obesity, and a shortage of transplant organs has fuelled a black market that exploits needy donors.

Qatar said on Thursday it has withdrawn its unit of more than 200 United Nations peacekeepers from south Lebanon, and said it did not intend to send more.
   The contingent from Qatar, the only Arab country in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, returned to Doha on Thursday and ‘will not be replaced for the moment,’ the official QNA news agency quoted General Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah as saying.
   ‘Three Qatari officers remain at Naqura HQ to deal only with questions of logistics within UNIFIL,’ Hamad said at Doha airport after greeting members of the 205-strong contingent.
   ‘We are happy to welcome back to their homeland our men who have completed their mission to keep the peace in south Lebanon,’ QNA quoted the general as saying.
   He gave no reason for the pull-out, which was not announced in advance.
   UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane said in Beirut that the departure of the Qataris had been planned.
   ‘It was part of the plan. This is a planned departure. There is nothing behind it.

Deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra will return to Thailand from a self-imposed exile before May, the kingdom’s new foreign minister said Friday.
   ‘Definitely he will return before May and his legal team will work out an exact date,’ the foreign minister, Noppadon Pattama, said reporters.
   Until he was sworn in as a cabinet member on Wednesday, Noppadon had been a personal lawyer for Thaksin, ousted by the army in a coup in September 2006.
   Since then, the former prime minister has been living in exile, mainly in Hong Kong and London. His wife Pojaman last month told a court that Thaksin would return to Thailand in May.
   The former first couple face corruption charges filed by the previous military government. Pojaman, who returned from Hong Kong in early January, appeared at the Supreme Court and pleaded not guilty in a statement.
   The new foreign minister said Thaksin had called to congratulate him on his new job.
   Noppadon was one of several close aides to Thaksin who joined the government of the prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, taking key posts including the finance minister and deputy prime minister.

The president, Vladimir Putin. heralded a wealthy Russia able to compete in a new ‘arms race’ with a speech Friday setting long term priorities for his hand-picked successor ahead of next month’s presidential election.
   Putin used the televised address in an ornate Kremlin hall before Russia’s ruling elite, including the full government, parliamentary leaders and top generals, to outline a roadmap up to 2020.
   Putin said his ‘plan to bring Russia out of systemic crisis’ meant the country was again ‘respected’ and that ‘lawlessness is over.’
   However more must be done in coming years to pull the economy from ‘extreme inefficiency’ and to guard against Western pressure, said Putin, whose eight year presidency has seen a flood of energy export revenues and the return of military clout.
   ‘There is a new turn in the arms race.... Russia will always respond to this new challenge,’ Putin said, promising ‘new weapons that are qualitatively the same or better than those of other countries.’
   The far-ranging nature of the speech underlined that Putin — barred by the constitution from seeking a third consecutive term in the presidential vote and due to step down in May — remains Russia’s dominant leader.
   His close ally Dmitry Medvedev, a career lawyer and bureaucrat who has never held elected office, is forecast to win by a landslide in the March 2 election where he faces little meaningful opposition.
   Medvedev’s main campaign message has been a promise to continue what he calls ‘the Putin plan.’
   Putin has said he may serve as prime minister if Medvedev is elected, prompting widespread speculation that the Kremlin master will retain significant influence in years to come — possibly returning for a third, non-consecutive Kremlin term.
   Putin listed booming foreign investment, the crushing of the Chechen independence rebellion, and rising salaries as among his main achievements since taking power eight years ago.
   ‘I know there is a lot left to do, but the course has been set,’ Putin said.
   Domestically the biggest problems named by Putin were the need for a more modern economy and an end to widespread corruption. ‘You have to go to every agency with a bribe: to the firemen, the health inspection, the gynaecologists. Whom don’t you have to go to? It’s just terrible.’
   Putin also directed fire at NATO and the United States for their own military build-ups and accused unnamed Western forces of ‘interference in domestic political fights (which is) not only immoral but also illegal.’
   Putin went on to accuse Western governments of using ‘dishonest competition... to get themselves access to our resources.’
   The March 2 election pits Medvedev against Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and a barely known politician Andrei Bogdanov.
   Opinion polls give Medvedev between 63 and around 80 per cent of support.
   Critics say that state-controlled resources, including national television, are being heavily manipulated to ensure that Medvedev faces no real difficulty in securing a landslide victory.
   The legitimacy of Medvedev’s likely election suffered a blow Thursday when Europe’s top democracy body, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, announced a boycott.

The religious head of the Anglican church sparked an angry row Friday after saying the adoption of some parts of shariah law alongside Britain’s legal system ‘seems unavoidable’.
   Leaders across the political spectrum criticised Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s call for ‘constructive accommodation’. He was also lambasted by the press.
   Prime minister Gordon Brown’s official spokesman has already distanced the premier from the remarks, stressing that ‘British law should apply in this country, based on British values’.
   Culture Secretary Andy Burnham went further, telling BBC television Williams was ‘wrong’ and warning his views were a ‘recipe for chaos, social chaos’. The main opposition Conservatives described the remarks as ‘unhelpful’.
   The issue of Muslim integration has been particularly sensitive since the July 2005 bombings in London in which four young British Muslims killed themselves and 52 others on the public transport system.
   Britain is home to nearly 1.6 million Muslims, some 2.7 per cent of the total population, according to the 2001 national census.
   On Thursday, Williams told BBC radio: ‘There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law.’
   He agreed that if Britain is to achieve social cohesion, people of religious faith had to be accommodated within the law and to this end, ‘it seems unavoidable’ that shariah should be applied in some circumstances.
   Giving an example of how shariah could come into play, Williams said: ‘There are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them.’
   Williams insisted there could be no place for ‘a kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states — the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women’.
   He also called on people in Britain to look at shariah ‘with a clearer eye’ and ‘not just associate it with what we read about Saudi Arabia or whatever.’
   The press joined politicians in laying into Williams’s comments.
   The Sun tabloid ran the headline ‘What A Burkha’, while the Independent broadsheet said he had made the same mistake as Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2006 triggered worldwide protests after quoting a historic text saying the Prophet Mohammed’s teachings were ‘evil and inhuman’.

Washington is wielding a visa weapon against prominent Kenyans who have allegedly encouraged weeks of post-election bloodshed, threatening to bar politicians and businessmen from visiting the US, America’s ambassador said on Thursday.
   Ambassador Michael Ranneberger said warnings already made to 10 people on all sides of Kenya’s political divide had ‘hit a nerve’ among the country’s elite and he warned that more people could be targeted over suspicions they have been financing violence.
   ’There is money changing hands,’ Ranneberger said in an interview with foreign journalists. ‘People are paying 4,000 shillings ($60) to burn down a house.’
   Washington sent letters to 10 politicians and businessmen suspected of supporting or inciting violence, Ranneberger said. US state department spokesman Tom Casey said the letters were sent to eight people. The discrepancy could not immediately be explained.
   He called it a ‘clear warning to them that we do not look favourably on what we understand to be their efforts to promote or incite violence’ after the elections. Casey said the visa reviews probably would take place over the next few days.
   Ranneberger said they also affect the immediate families of those targeted.
   Casey would not name those involved but, asked if high-level Kenyan government officials were included, said the letters were sent to ‘more regional figures’ from both major political movements.
   Canada’s ambassador, Ross Hynes, reportedly said Thursday that his country was already barring some Kenyans from entering, although he did not provide any names. Britain, Kenya’s former colonial ruler, said it could take similar steps.
   Long considered one of Africa’s most stable democracies, Kenya has been devastated by strife since a December 27 election that most observers say was rigged.
   More than 1,000 people have been killed and 300,000 driven from their homes in fighting that has often pitted many of the East African country’s myriad ethnic groups against one another. The economy has been gutted.
   Opposition leaders say President Mwai Kibaki stole the presidential vote from rival candidate Raila Odinga and should step down. Kibaki insists he was fairly re-elected and says his opponents should take their case to Kenya’s courts, which are stacked with his supporters.

The United States expressed ‘serious concerns’ Thursday about the March 29 general elections in Zimbabwe, a country it finds under constant repression from president Robert Mugabe’s regime.
   ‘In terms of Zimbabwe, we have very serious concerns about the upcoming elections,’ said state department spokesman Tom Casey.
   ‘Certainly, the record of the Mugabe government and its continued repression of political opposition in that country doesn’t leave us with a lot of hope that these upcoming elections are going to be free and fair,’ he added.
   Mugabe, 83, who has ruled the former British colony since independence in 1980, is hoping to secure a sixth term in office at joint parliamentary and presidential elections on March 29. Casey strongly suggested the Zimbabwe polls could benefit from the presence of international observers.
   ‘Certainly, we would want to see international observers there not only just a matter of general principle, but because there have been so many problems and concerns with the political system in Zimbabwe and with the actions of president Mugabe,’ the spokesman said. Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF party cut former finance minister Simba Makoni adrift Wednesday over his electoral bid to topple Mugabe, saying he had ‘expelled himself’ by taking on the veteran president.

Like thousands of people who fled a weekend rebel assault on the Chadian capital, Fatima Abdelrahim is hungry and thirsty but too scared to go home.
   Abdelrahim still bears the long, roughly-stitched scar where shrapnel tore through her arm when a mortar fell on her house the last time the rebels attacked N’Djamena in April 2006.
   This time she was luckier: her only injury a sprained ankle as she emerged from a wooden boat when she crossed the river. But with the remnants of the rebel force still inside Chad, some 600 km (375 miles) from the capital, she will not go back.
   ‘I can’t go to N’Djamena,’ Abdelrahim told Reuters in the Cameroonian border town of Kousseri. Aid agencies reckon up to 60,000 Chadians crossed the river border after the weekend attack on N’Djamena. A few hundred crossed back into the capital at the urging of Chadian police on Wednesday, but most of them do not dare.
   Many thousands are living in school rooms, makeshift shelters or sleeping rough in Kousseri, where supplies are running short and refugees say they can ill-afford rocketing prices for food and drinking water.
   Many refugees are waiting for word from loved ones left behind in N’Djamena, where burnt-out pickups litter the streets and authorities are still collecting dead bodies.
   ‘We’re waiting for peace. We have no information here, nothing,’ said Amina Agoni, sitting with her family in the dusty square in front of Kousseri’s town hall.
   Two of her sons were badly burned when a mortar or rocket exploded in their house, but they have yet to receive treatment. Ten-year-old Abaka Abayah sat listlessly on the ground, congealed butter smeared over the exposed flesh of his knees where the blast burned his skin away.
   Nearby, Nara Moustapha peered through her Muslim head dress and patted her large belly. Her baby is due in 10 days, she said in Arabic through an interpreter, and she wants help.
   Aid agencies have struggled to help refugees in Kousseri.
   Cameroon’s main port, Douala, is over 1,700 km away. Many agencies have offices in N’Djamena but much of the city was damaged or looted, and some staff have left.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said Thursday he hopes relations between the world body and the United States will improve after president George W Bush leaves office next year.
   Ban said that he a ‘good’ relationship with Bush, but that ‘I hope we will have an even stronger partnership between the United Nations and United States’ when the next president takes office in January.
   ‘I have been watching the debates and presidential campaigns and I think you have very good candidates,’ he told the Economic Club of Chicago.
   Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are battling for the Democratic presidential nomination. On the Republican side, Senator John McCain has all but secured his party’s nomination for the November election.
   Regarding Darfur, Ban, when asked what the United States should do to further assist the United Nations in Sudan’s strife-torn region, the UN chief pointed to the need for helicopters and other much-needed resources.

The president, Nicolas Sarkozy, pledged ‘new hope’ to France’s riot-hit suburbs on Friday with a plan to give jobs and training to 100,000 youths, root out racial discrimination and slash drug crime.
   ‘Failure is not an option,’ Sarkozy said, as he unveiled proposals to tackle the root causes of riots in 2005: soaring unemployment in the high-immigration suburbs, discrimination and simmering tensions between youths and police.
   Dubbed ‘Hope for the Suburbs’, the plan was drawn up during four months of consultations in the ‘banlieues’, where many descendants of African and Arab immigrants say they are treated like outcasts in French society.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, met his Russian counterpart Viktor Zubkov on Friday in a bid to repair ties damaged by trade and defence disputes that have divided Russia and the West.
   Tusk and Zubkov said at the start of talks in Moscow that they wanted ‘dialogue’ to improve relations, Russian news agencies reported. Tusk was to meet the president, Vladimir Putin, in the Kremlin later on Friday.
   ‘The Russian government is open to dialogue and is ready to find solutions that will bring Russian-Polish relations to a new level,’ Zubkov said.
   Tusk said the talks ‘weaken critics in Warsaw and Moscow and help us understand that we should have a dialogue and resolve existing problems.’

Kenya’s political rivals tried to inject some momentum on Friday into slow-moving peace talks brokered by former UN head Kofi Annan aimed at ending weeks of bloodshed.
   Four people were killed overnight in tribal violence in the Kisii region of Nyanza province in western Kenya, two of whom were ‘hacked to death’, the police said.
   Negotiations led by Annan entered a crucial stage this week, with the government and the opposition tackling head-on their dispute over the December presidential elections.
   East African foreign ministers called for an end to the violence —which has killed more than 1,000 people since the election—and threw their support behind Annan’s mediation after meeting with the sides in Nairobi.

Khmer Rouge `Brother Number Two’ Nuon Chea blamed foreigners on Friday for Cambodia’s current ills, thereby refusing to acknowledge the legacy of Pol Pot’s murderous regime at the UN-backed ‘Killing Fields’ tribunal.
   ‘My fellow Cambodians, today Cambodia is enjoying peace, solidarity and national reconciliation and its development is improving gradually,’ the octogenarian former guerrilla chief, charged with crimes against humanity, said at his bail hearing.

A man who claims he may be the illegitimate son of Britain’s late princess Margaret won a new legal victory Friday in his bid to see her will, even though a judge called his claim ‘scandalous.’
   Robert Brown, a 52-year-old accountant, believes he could be the love child of Margaret, who died in 2002 aged 71, and British World War Two fighter pilot Peter Townsend, with whom she had an ill-fated love affair.
   Margaret is the late sister of Queen Elizabeth II, and if Brown were her son he could be 12th in line to the throne.
   In July last year, a judge at the family division of London’s High Court threw out his claim, saying it had no basis in fact, while the lawyer for both estates said Bro-wn’s belief was ‘scandalous’ and based on an ‘insane delusion.’