Tentative talks between Israel and the Palestinians aimed at restarting the peace process could begin next month, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during meetings in Europe to rally support from British and German leaders.
A three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would likely take place in the Middle East in the first half of next month but not constitute formal negotiations, Rice said.
Rice briefed German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin and said that US, German and other diplomats would convene a Middle East strategy session early next month in Washington.
Rice later held talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. Blair has made the task of reviving peace talks a key goal of his final months in office. He toured the region last month.
Rice said her planned discussions with Olmert and Abbas would form a peacemaking summit ahead of later talks to tackle the toughest issues.
"We're not yet at the point where I think we can determine what we would do about formal negotiations, when and if" they can occur, Rice said. "It's really a time to try to get the parties into more of a confidence-building phase and we'll see what comes after that."
Both leaders have suffered blows to their authority in the last year: Olmert by last summer's disappointing war in Lebanon and allegations of political corruption in his ranks; Abbas by his year-long internal power struggle with Hamas radicals.
The British leader, who will step down by September, met Rice without his staff present, and had planned to brief his advisers on the session yesterday, a Downing Street spokesman said.
Rice acknowledged that the requirements of the 2003 step-by-step plan for Palestinian statehood, known as the "road map," had become something of an obstacle in restarting talks between the two sides, but she said it remains the guideline.
As Rice touched down in London, Blair faced a political storm as a senior Cabinet minister denounced US President George W. Bush's administration as the most "right wing in living memory."
Blair's Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain, said in an interview published on Thursday that Bush's "neo-con unilateralism" had damaged the fight against global terrorism and "taken the world's eyes off the ball of solving the Middle East conflict."
"It's not only failed to provide a coherent international policy, it's failed wherever it's been tried," Hain was quoted as telling New Statesman magazine.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS