Jordan’s king urged US President Barack Obama on Sunday to take a more forceful role in the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, warning of a new Middle East war if there is no significant progress in the next 18 months.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, King Abdullah described the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as the core problem of the region and solving it would help the US in dealing with Iran and combating the appeal of radical Islamic groups like al-Qaeda.
“In the next 18 months, if we don’t move the process forward and bring people to the negotiation table, there will be another conflict between Israel and another protagonist,” he said in the interview recorded in Washington on Friday. “If it’s left to the players, the Israelis and the Palestinians by themselves, we’re not going to get anywhere. It can only happen if there is an American umbrella with a determined American president.”
Jordan is one of two Arab countries that have signed a peace treaty with Israel and is a strong US ally in the region. The majority of the country’s citizens are also of Palestinian origin, making it very interested in the ongoing peace talks.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, relaunched in late 2007, have made little visible progress — in part because of Palestinian infighting. The new Israeli government also has not endorsed the goal of an independent Palestinian state.
A Palestinian state alongside Israel is the centerpiece of US peace efforts in the region.
The king also addressed the use of torture, acknowledging that he had heard in the press that it was being used by US, but denying allegations that Jordan was involved.
Human Rights Watch, among other groups, has issued reports alleging that the Jordanian intelligence service brutally interrogated detainees on behalf of the CIA.
Instead, Abdullah said his intelligence services specialized in turning enemy agents and using them as informants.
“I think that we have been very smart in being intelligent [and] convincing operatives that we have come across to end up working for us — and you can’t do that when it comes to torture,” he said.
The king also noted that Obama had substantially improved the image of the US in the region.
“America is providing a new image of how things should be done and I think the world has a belief in the president,” he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS