Israeli plans to build 1,100 new homes in and around Arab East Jerusalem came under fire on Tuesday from Palestinians who see the city as the capital of their future state, clouding already troubled peace talks.
   Israeli officials cited ‘progress’ after negotiators met for the first time on two consecutive days. But comments from ministers threatening new attacks on the Gaza Strip and vowing to expand Jewish settlements angered Palestinian leaders.
   The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is under heavy pressure from both domestic opponents and rivals in his fragile coalition to take a tougher stance in Gaza and put off negotiations on the hotly contested issue of Jerusalem.
   Criticised on both sides for a lack of progress since the US president, George W Bush, helped relaunch long-stalled peace talks in November, the chief negotiators – the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorie – met on Monday and Tuesday, Livni’s spokesman said.
   Olmert and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, started with the goal of reaching a statehood deal before Bush steps down next January. But Israel and the Palestinians are divided on what that deal should entail.
   Abbas wants a full-blown agreement setting up a Palestinian state. Olmert said in Germany he hoped to reach ‘further understandings which hopefully will lead to a basis for an agreement between us and the Palestinian Authority.’
   Palestinians pointed to new signs of trouble on Tuesday when Israel’s housing ministry said new housing tenders were being prepared: 750 near Jerusalem and up to 370 in what is known to Israelis as Har Homa and to Palestinians as Jabal Abu Ghneim.
   Peace talks bogged down in December after Israel announced a previous plan for 307 units at Har Homa.
   Palestinians have also expressed concern at Israeli threats to step up an offensive and kill senior Hamas Islamists in the Gaza Strip in what Israel says is a legitimate response to rocket fire on Israeli towns from the enclave.
   ‘At the end of the day, violence will breed violence. It will add to the complexities,’ Abbas aide Saeb Erekat said.
   Although Abbas’s secular Fatah faction is deeply hostile to Hamas following the Islamists’ seizure of Gaza in June, the president has been at pains to speak up for the 1.5 million people of Gaza suffering under an Israeli embargo on Hamas.
   Israel is trying to make the case that it can maintain parallel tracks with the Palestinians, one aimed at reaching a deal with Abbas, the other at breaking Hamas.
   The defence minister, Ehud Barak, suggested on Tuesday that Israel would not immediately launch an all-out military campaign in the Gaza Strip. ‘It won’t happen right away. There are reasons why we are not acting with full force right now. It will happen when the time is right,’ he said, without elaborating.

East Timor was set to issue arrest warrants for 18 suspects after assassination bids on the prime minister and president Jose Ramos-Horta, who underwent further surgery Wednesday on triple gunshot wounds.
   The prime minister, Xanana Gusmao, who escaped an ambush on his motorcade during Monday’s twin attacks, said he would ask parliament to extend for 10 days a state of emergency in the fragile nation set to expire late in the evening.
   ‘I ask that all accept this and understand that the steps taken by the state are made because the state cares for the security of the people,’ Gusmao said.
   Under the state of emergency, an 8:00pm to 6:00am curfew is in place, and gatherings and rallies of people are banned. Gusmao said that the restrictions were aimed at ‘continuing to maintain stability.’
   The UN special representative to East Timor Atul Khare praised the government and in particular Gusmao’s reaction to the assaults, saying they were ‘severe tests for Timor-Leste, but the initial report card is very good.’
   East Timor is formally known as Timor-Leste. The nation’s prosecutor-general, who is responsible for issuing arrest warrants, said the number of suspects in the case could expand.
   ‘On this preliminary list there are 18 names and this number may still grow, depending on the progress of the case,’ Longuinhos Monteiro told reporters.
   Assailants, presumed to be renegade soldiers, melted into the hills around Dili after the shootouts, which left their self-styled leader Alfredo Reinado dead and jolted the six-year-old nation into a fresh crisis.
   The opposition Fretilin party lashed out at the government for failing to prevent the assassination attempts, with former prime minister and party secretary general Mari Alkatiri saying that if he had still been in power, people would have been calling for him to resign.
   Alkatiri stepped down to take responsibility for unrest that flared in 2006 and saw Reinado emerge as a key figure.
   ‘These murder attempts are the result of a lack of capacity of the government to deal with internal security.... But we are not looking for the PM to resign, we are looking for accountability,’ he said.

Fighting between Sri Lankan troops and Tamil Tigers intensified in the north of the island Wednesday, officials said, but there was no sign of major gains by either side despite a rising body count.
   The International Red Cross also sounded the alarm over what it described as ‘appalling levels’ of civilian casualties, saying non-combatants were being increasingly caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted.
   Government forces stepped up a three-pronged attack on the mini-state run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam but were facing stiff resistance from the ethnic rebels, defence sources said.
   After three days of ferocious battles in Mannar district in the northwest and Weli Oya in the northeast, security forces said they had killed more than 110 guerrillas.
   For their part, the Tigers said they killed 42 government soldiers and wounded another 53 in Mannar alone on Tuesday, significantly higher than the casualties acknowledged by the military.
   The army also said two of its soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack just outside territory controlled by the LTTE, which wants to carve out a separate Tamil state in the north and east of the ethnic Sinhalese-majority island.

True to tradition, Saudi Arabia’s religious police are zealously enforcing a ban on Valentine’s Day symbols in the austere Muslim kingdom.
   But in other Gulf Arab countries, celebrations of the traditional lovers’ day are now common and appear to be gaining acceptance.
   ‘We have not been selling red roses for a week and we will not bring in any until Valentine’s Day is over,’ said Alan, a Filipino working at a flower shop in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
   He said a member of the religious police, known as Muttawa, visited the shop a week ago and ordered the florists not to display any red roses in the runup to February 14.
   At a gift shop in the city, a salesman said the Muttawa had told him to remove from the shelves any red-colour gifts symbolising the feast of love.
   ‘We also removed red gift boxes so as not to expose ourselves to punishment, which could be to close the shop and arrest staff,’ said Mohammad Hassanein al-Hawari.
   The Muttawa, whose formal name is the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, does not stop at just openly inspecting shops. ‘Agents’ in camouflage clothes check to ensure their orders are heeded, he said.
   One member of the religious police, who gave his name only as Abdurrahman, checked out shops lining Prince Sultan Street in Olaya district for anything smacking of Valentine’s Day. None was evident.
   ‘The West exports to us habits and feasts which contradict sharia (Islamic law) and wants us to imitate them. We want to make sure that sharia is implemented. We punish anyone who commits or abets a violation,’ he said.

Pakistani troops fired a short-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile during exercises on Wednesday in the third such training launch in as many weeks, the army said.
   Soldiers from the country’s strategic force command carried out a ‘successful’ launch of the Hatf III (Ghaznavi) missile, which has a range of 290 kilometres, an army statement said.
   The launch was witnessed by caretaker prime minister Mohammedmian Soomro and army chief Ashfaq Kayani, the statement added.
   Pakistan and India have routinely conducted missile tests since the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours carried out tit-for-tat atomic detonations in May 1998.

The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, made an historic apology to Aborigines Wednesday for injustices committed over two centuries of white settlement, saying he wanted ‘to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul.’
   The apology represented a watershed in Australia’s often fraught history of race relations, with television networks airing it live and thousands of people crowding around huge screens in major cities to witness the event.
   ‘We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians,’ Rudd told parliament.
   Parliament’s public galleries were packed for the reconciliation gesture, with 3,000 people watching on screens erected on lawns opposite the building.
   Many Aborigines had travelled thousands of kilometres to Canberra for the occasion, and some wept as Rudd said sorry for the wrongs the original Australians endured after British settlers arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788.
   ‘This is the most significant moment for our people that’s happened in my lifetime,’ Aboriginal man Darryl Towney said.
   ‘For us, this is like the Berlin Wall coming down.’
   Rudd’s apology went much further than initially expected, drawing emotional applause, cheers and tears from the crowd and culminating in a standing ovation both inside and outside parliament.
   It referred to the ‘past mistreatment’ of all Aborigines, not just the ‘Stolen Generations’ of children whose forcible removal from their families provided the initial impetus for the apology.
   Rudd did single out the Stolen Generations, mostly mixed-race children taken from their families until 1970 in a bid to assimilate them into white society while full-blooded Aborigines were expected to die out.
   But he also offered a broader apology and repeatedly used the word ‘sorry,’ an expression that took on a huge symbolic meaning for Aborigines when Rudd’s conservative predecessor John Howard refused to utter it when he was in power. Rudd said sorry for the ‘pain, suffering and hurt’ of the stolen generations and their broken families.
   ‘For the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry,’ he said.
   Rudd, who ended Howard’s 11-year rule with a landslide election win last November, criticised his predecessor’s refusal to apologise after an official report presented in 1997 recommended the move.
   ‘From the nation’s parliament there has been a stony and stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade,’ he said.
   Howard was the only living former prime minister who failed to attend the ceremony in parliament. His Liberal Party, now in opposition, supported the motion of apology.
   Rudd said those present had come to deal with Australia’s ‘unfinished business’.
   ‘To remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land,’ he said.

Chief mediator Kofi Annan on Wednesday put Kenya’s crisis talks back on course toward a deal after defusing a row over his plan for a ‘grand coalition’ government to end post-election turmoil.
   Annan had irked negotiators for the president, Mwai Kibaki, when he said parliament on Tuesday that a power-sharing government could be a way out of the crisis sparked by the disputed December presidential election.
   But in talks early Wednesday at a secret location, Annan clarified his statement, saying this ‘represents his perspective on the discussions and does not imply a formal agreement between the two parties.’ ‘The parties continue to work constructively and are making good progress,’ said UN spokesman Nasser Ega-Musa in a statement.
   Kibaki’s lead negotiator Martha Karua had sent a protest letter to Annan after he told parliament that a ‘grand coalition’ could oversee reforms in Kenya to pave the way for elections in two years.
   ‘My team is alarmed at some serious inaccurate statement made by your excellence (Kofi Annan),’ said Karua, the minister for justice and constitutional affairs.
   Forming a transitional government to prepare elections ‘has not been discussed or agreed upon’ in the mediation talks now in their third week, she said.
   The statement was in line with Kibaki’s long-held view that he won the presidential vote fairly and should not have to share power with his rival Raila Odinga, who says he was robbed of the presidency.
   Kenya descended into violence after Kibaki, 76, was officially declared the winner of the December 27 presidential election that the opposition said was rigged. International observers also found flaws in the tallying of ballots.
   According to the Kenyan Red Cross, more than 1,000 people have died in rioting, tribal clashes and police raids since the vote and 300,000 people have been displaced, shattering Kenya’s reputation as one of Africa’s most stable countries.
   Annan had addressed parliament to secure broad support for constitutional and statutory changes that a final settlement might require, but his ‘grand coalition’ proposal angered a group of MPs from Kibaki’s party.
   ‘Unfortunately, it appears that one of the parties may have misunderstood remarks,’ said the statement from the mediation team.
   Crisis talks continued on Wednesday at a secret location, away from the media glare, as Annan sought to clinch a deal by the end of the week.
   Political analyst Onweri Angima downplayed the strong reaction from Kibaki’s camp to Annan’s mooted power-sharing plan, saying it was ‘posturing’ ahead of the final round.
   ‘I am sure that they are very, very reluctant,’ said Angima.
   ‘But someone of Annan’s calibre would not make such a statement, which is so weighty, without having some indication that it is plausible,’ said Angima, a program director at the Centre for Multiparty Democracy in Nairobi.
   Speculation about the agreement centred on a possible power-sharing government in which Odinga, 62, could be named prime minister, a post that would have to be created by constitutional amendment.
   Relative calm has taken hold across the country for the first time in weeks, with no incidents reported in western Kenya, which had been the worst hit by the violence.

Carla Bruni insisted in her debut interview Wednesday that her marriage to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was for life and that she would put her pop star career on hold to become first lady.
   ‘I am culturally Italian and I would not like to divorce,’ the former supermodel said L’Express week explaining the ‘instantaneous’ love with the 53-year-old president that led to their whirlwind two-month romance and their wedding on February 2.
   ‘So I am the first lady up until the end of my husband’s mandate, and then his wife until death,’ said the 40-year-old heiress, who has in the past been linked to rock stars Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, and once said monogamy ‘bores’ her.
   ‘I know that life can hold surprises, but that’s what I hope for.’
   Bruni said she would put her musical career to one side after the release of her next album – currently in production studios – and that any profits from it would be donated to charity.
   Her first album, released in 2002, ‘Quelqu’un m’a dit’, sold two million copies.
   ‘I won’t stop myself from writing and composing, but until the end of my husband’s mandate, I probably won’t record another album. After that, we’ll see.’
   But she said she was determined to stamp her identity on her new role. ‘Just as Nicolas is unlike his predecessors, I would also – while respecting the dignity of the office, like to keep my own personality,’ said Bruni, who plans to keep her own flat as well as the Elysee apartment.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong proposed sending 10 million Chinese women to the United States, in talks with top envoy Henry Kissinger in 1973, according to documents released Tuesday.
   The powerful chairman of the Chinese Communist Party said he believed such emigration could kickstart bilateral trade but could also ‘harm’ the United States with a population explosion similar to China, according to documents released Tuesday by the State Department on US-China ties between 1973 to 1976.
   In a long conversation that stretched way past midnight at Mao’s residence on February 17, 1973, the cigar-chomping Chinese leader referred to the dismal trade between the two countries, saying China was a ‘very poor country’ and ‘what we have in excess is women.’
   He first suggested sending ‘thousands’ of women but as an afterthought proposed ‘10 million,’ drawing laughter at the meeting, also attended by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai.
   Kissinger, who was president Richard Nixon’s national security advisor at that time, said Mao that the United States had no ‘quotas’ or ‘tariffs’ for Chinese women, drawing more laughter.
   Kissinger then tried to highlight to Mao the threat posed by the Soviet Union and other global concerns as he moved to lay the groundwork for restoring diplomatic ties a year after Nixon’s historic visit to China.
   But Mao dragged the talks back to the topic of Chinese women.
   ‘Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens,’ Mao said.
   ‘Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million,’ he said.
   Kissinger noted that Mao was ‘improving his offer.’
   Mao continued, ‘By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things.
   ‘They give birth to children and our children are too many.’
   A shrewd diplomat, Kissinger seemed to turn the tables on Mao, replying, ‘It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.’

A growing number of frustrated MPs are demanding that the Iraqi parliament be dissolved, politicians said on Wednesday as bitter divisions continued to stall key laws and the annual budget.
   Leaders of the main political blocs are meeting in an urgent bid to resolve the crisis, which has been caused by deep distrust between MPs, Jaber Habib, an independent Shia lawmaker said on Wednesday.
   ‘There is a big crisis of confidence among the parliamentary blocs,’ Habib said. ‘The leaders of the blocs are meeting among themselves in the backrooms in a bid to break the deadlock.’
   Reflecting the despair, parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani warned after Tuesday’s session ended in disarray and without a vote on the long-delayed budget, that there was support for a dissolution of the legislature.
   ‘I have a memorandum signed by some political blocs demanding that parliament be dissolved if MPs fail to vote on the budget,’ he said. Sadrist MP Baha al-Aaraji was among those who called on Tuesday for a dissolution but the head of the Sadr bloc in parliament, Nassar al-Rubaie, said Aaraji had been ‘expressing his personal views’.
   ‘The unofficial talk among MPs is that the best solution to the crisis is to dissolve parliament,’ Rubaie added, however.
   Should parliament be dissolved, new elections would have to be held within 60 days.
   The move would further undermine prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s beleaguered government, which has been hit by walkouts that have left him with almost half of the posts in his cabinet vacant.
   Washington sees the passing of a series of flagship laws as a ‘benchmark’ to measure political reconciliation between the country’s deeply divided communities.
   US officials repeatedly express concern that Iraqi politicians are not making use of the space provided by vastly improved security partly effected by a ‘surge’ of US troops since June.
   Shia lawmakers walked out of Tuesday’s rare night session when Kurdish MPs refused to drop their demand to lump the budget vote with two other controversial draft laws – an amnesty bill and one setting a date for provincial elections.

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said Tuesday she planned to ask Congress for extra funds to boost cooperation between US diplomats and troops in post-conflict stabilisation operations.
   ‘Much of our work with the military these past several years has, frankly, been experimental, even improvisational,’ the top US diplomat said in a speech to students at Georgetown University in Washington.
   ‘Now we must lay a new institutional foundation that will form the future nucleus of our civil military partnerships,’ said Rice who had tense ties with former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, replaced by Robert Gates in 2006.
   ‘We are urging Congress to meet the president’s request to double the number of our positions for political advisers to military forces; diplomats who can work not only with four-star generals, but also deploy as civilian experts to Navy SEAL teams and to North Africa,’ she said.

The UN Security Council on Tuesday slammed the continuing recruitment and use of children in armed conflict and deplored the systematic use of rape and other forms of sexual violence against them.
   It did so in a non-binding statement adopted at the end of a day-long debate attended by the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, United Nations’ Children’s Fund executive director Ann Veneman and Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN special representative for children and armed conflict.
   The text, adopted by all 15 members, stressed the need to end impunity for such violations and abuses and for ‘a broad strategy of conflict prevention, which addresses the root causes of armed conflict in a comprehensive manner.’
   It said the council ‘strongly condemns the continuing recruitment and use of children in armed conflict’ and ‘is concerned with the widespread use and systematic use of rape and other forms of sexual violence against children particularly girls in situations of armed conflict.’
   ‘Sexual violence is often used as a weapon of war and there must be greater focus and attention on this issue,’ Veneman said. ‘We need to put an end to the abuse, the rapes and the sexual violence.’
   The council called for the full implementation of the monitoring and reporting mechanism on children and armed conflict called for in a 2005 council resolution.

Serbia and Russia have demanded an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Kosovo’s moves toward independence, the EU external relations commissioner, Benita Ferrero Waldner, said Wednesday.
   She said ahead of an EU-Russia summit in the Slovenian capital that Serbia and Russia wanted the Security Council to meet on Thursday to discuss the Serbian province’s vow to unilaterally breakaway.
   The anticipated declaration of independence could come as soon as Sunday.
   Ferrero Waldner along with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Dmitrij Rupel, the foreign minister for Slovenia which currently holds the European Union presidency, are set to meet Wednesday with Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov, with Kosovo high on their agenda.
   ‘We do hope to be able to convince Russia that the status quo is unsustainable,’ Ferrero Waldner said.

At least 17 Danish newspapers printed Wednesday a controversial cartoon of Prophet Muhammad a day after police foiled a murder plot against the cartoonist, as editors vowed to defend freedom of expression.
   Three of the country’s biggest dailies were among those that published the cartoon, which featured the prophet’s head with a turban that looked like a bomb with a lit fuse.
   The caricature was one of 12 cartoons published in September 2005 by daily Jyllands-Posten which were considered offensive by many Muslims. Their publication sparked violent protests in a number of Muslim countries in January and February 2006.
   On Tuesday, the Danish police said they had arrested three people, a Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisian nationals, suspected of plotting to kill the cartoonist of the turban cartoon, Kurt Westergaard.
   The newspapers that printed the cartoon on Wednesday said they did so to take a stand against self-censorship.