US President George W. Bush (l), Israel's President Shimon Peres and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (r) attend a ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Beit-ul-Moqaddas, Jan. 11.

BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS, Jan. 11--President George W. Bush, hardening his tone towards Israel on Thursday, urged an end to “the occupation“ of the West Bank and pushed for a peace treaty to be signed within a year to create a Palestinian state.
According to Reuters, Bush does not always use the politically charged word “occupation“ to describe Israel’s hold on lands captured in a 1967 war. It is a term Palestinians seeking a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip employ frequently to describe their plight.
“The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it,“ Bush said in a statement.
Bush’s language, after he traveled to the West Bank city of Ramallah past Israeli checkpoints and settlements, could cause political pain to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose right-wing coalition partners usually bridle at such remarks.
“There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967,“ Bush said. He had earlier met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and visited Bethlehem, also in the West Bank.
Bush pressed the Palestinians to rein in militants. He said any negotiations must also ensure Israel has “secure, recognized and defensible borders“ alongside a “viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent“ Palestine.
Challenging skeptics of his new push for peace on the first US presidential visit to Ramallah, he told a news conference with Abbas: “I believe it’s going to happen, that there will be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office.“
Critics say Bush, who steps down in January 2009, has failed to deploy Washington’s full weight in seeking to end the 60-year-old conflict during his first seven years in office.
A summit he hosted at Annapolis in November ended a hiatus in negotiations since 2000. There, Bush said Israel should show the world it was ready to begin to end its occupation.
But many doubt differences can be overcome now, as Bush seeks to burnish his legacy in the Middle East after five years of war in Iraq. Olmert is politically weak and Abbas cannot control the Gaza Strip.
Some right-wing ministers have threatened to quit Olmert’s government should he make any sweeping peace concessions.

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 11--A UN internal investigative unit has found an unexpected amount of fraud and abuse at the United Nations and is currently investigating 250 cases, including alleged sexual and financial offenses, Reuters reported.
“Our caseload has been very steady over the last three months, around 250 cases,“ Inga-Britt Ahlenius, head of the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), told reporters. “We found mismanagement and fraud and corruption to an extent we didn’t really expect.“
Ahlenius said two-thirds of the cases being reviewed related to peacekeeping missions. Around 80 involved possible sexual exploitation and abuse.
The former chief auditor of Sweden held the news conference in response to media reports suggesting that there has been widespread fraud related to UN peacekeeping contracts.
She said investigators have already confirmed that contracts worth around $600 million involved fraud at some level.
The total UN peacekeeping budget for 2007-2008 exceeds $5 billion.
Overall, Ahlenius said that the OIOS and its Procurement Task Force had so far submitted to UN’s top management 25 reports detailing mismanagement, fraud and corruption.
Robert Appleton, head of the Procurement Task Force, a temporary body set up in 2006 after corruption was revealed in the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq, said only a minority of UN contracts were irregular and many allegations could not be substantiated.
“There’s no question that some of the large contracts here have been tainted, but in terms of the number of contracts, it’s not anywhere near the majority,“ Appleton said.
Ahlenius said the OIOS had begun urgently reviewing a $250 million contract the United Nations signed with a unit of US defense firm Lockheed Martin Corp without competitive bidding to build five peacekeeping bases in Sudan’s war-torn western region of Darfur.
“We have been mandated by the General Assembly to carry out a review of the circumstances,“ she said.

MOSCOW, Jan. 11--Russia’s newly-appointed ambassador to NATO criticized a key European arms treaty as “colonial“ in an interview with the official daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta published on Friday.
Russia last month suspended adherence to the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, which was signed in 1990 and regulates the deployment of armed forces across Europe and western Russia.
“As far as the CFE is concerned, we must liberate ourselves from colonial dependency in the security sphere. The CFE in its original form is an anachronism of the Cold War,“ Dmitry Rogozin said in the interview.
Referring to member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Rogozin said: “They have to understand that their own security cannot be earned at the expense of someone else’s. We have to talk with them respectfully.“
President Vladimir Putin appointed Rogozin, a nationalist politician known for his hawkish foreign policy views, on Thursday in a move seen by analysts as signalling a harder Kremlin stance towards NATO, reported AFP.
Rogozin, a former member of parliament who made his name in the 1990s defending the rights of ethnic Russians living in the ex-Soviet Baltic states, once referred to NATO as “a dying organization.“

Pakistani policemen help their injured colleagues at the site of a suicide attack in Lahore, Jan. 10.

LAHORE, Pakistan, Jan. 11--Pakistani investigators on Friday said “tribal“ elements were behind a suicide attack which killed 22 policemen, as security forces went on high alert for the holy month of Moharram.
But officers investigating Thursday’s deadly blast on police gathered in the commercial heart of Lahore said it was too early to determine who orchestrated the latest in a wave of suicide attacks which has rocked the country, reported AFP.
“It seems that the incident has links in the tribal regions and Thursday’s blast was the handiwork of those who have carried out similar strikes in other parts of the country,“ senior police officer Aftab Cheema said.
“The inquiry team is looking into all aspects of the crime and we hope to reach the bottom of the incident and those involved in it very soon.“
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 26 people after a suicide bomber approached a group of about 60 riot police outside the Lahore high court and detonated a device packed with ball bearings.
The blast came two weeks to the day after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in a gun and suicide attack in Rawalpindi, and deepened fears of a bloodsoaked buildup to crucial elections on February 18.
Pakistani leaders, backed by their close allies in the United States, said the bombing was a clear attempt to sabotage the democratic process in the nuclear-armed Islamic republic.
“We condemn this act of violence and any attempts to subvert the democratic process in Pakistan prior to elections,“ US National Security Council spokeswoman Katherine Starr said in Washington.
Pakistan has been convulsed by dozens of suicide bombings which have claimed more than 800 lives over the past 12 months.
The violence has usually been blamed on Al-Qaeda-linked militants which the United States has said are regrouping in rugged and semi-autonomous tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.
The violence has coincided with mounting civil unrest and calls for President Pervez Musharraf to restore full civilian rule eight years after he seized power in a military coup.

Clara Rojas

Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan. 11--Two women hostages who were released by Colombian rebels on Thursday were greeted with hugs and tears as they were reunited with their families after years of captivity in the jungle.
Clara Rojas and former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez de Perdomo landed in Caracas aboard a private jet just hours after Venezuelan helicopters plucked them from a secret location deep in the Colombian jungle, reported AFP.
Rojas, 44, who had a son with one of her captors in 2004, two years after she was kidnapped, covered her 76-year-old mother Clara Gonzalez in kisses.
Rojas was looking forward to being reunited with her three-year-old son Emmanuel, who is in Colombian government care.
The rebels had taken the boy away from her when he was eight months old after she gave birth to him while in captivity.
After taking the boy from Rojas, the rebels had handed Emmanuel to a caretaker in a village. But authorities took custody of him in 2006 after the sick boy was taken to a hospital.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had promised last month to release the two women and the boy to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But the rebels delayed the release, while the Colombian government revealed on December 31 that the FARC did not have Emmanuel.
Rojas was the campaign manager for Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt when they were both seized by the FARC when Betancourt was running for president in February 2002.

TOKYO, Jan. 11--Japan’s ruling coalition forced a bill through parliament Friday to revive a US-backed anti-terror mission in the Indian Ocean, clearing the way for Japanese ships to return to the region after a months- long absence.
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said the new mission would be dispatched by the end of the month, launching a limited version of a six-year refueling operation that had been suspended in November, AP said.
To get the mission approved, Fukuda’s ruling coalition used a rare legislative procedure of winning a vote in the powerful lower house by a two-thirds majority to overrule the opposition-controlled upper house.
“The refueling mission is Japan’s effort to do as much as it can, utilizing our ability,“ Fukuda said in a statement after the measure passed. “It is truly significant that Japan can rejoin the fight against terrorism.“
Japan had refueled ships since 2001 in support of US-led forces in Afghanistan, but was forced to abandon the mission last fall when the resurgent opposition blocked an extension.
The measure enacted Friday will limit Japanese ships to refueling boats not directly involved in hostilities in Afghanistan, a restriction aimed at winning over a public wary of violating the spirit of the pacifist constitution.
Following the vote, Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba promptly ordered ships to prepare for dispatch. The fleet should leave port in two to three weeks and resume operations in five to six weeks, the ministry said.
Fukuda and other ruling party lawmakers argued the mission was needed to fulfill Japan’s obligations in the global war against terrorism and give the country a world role commensurate with its economic clout.
“Japan must join the world in the fight against terrorism,“ ruling party lawmaker Akio Sato told parliament ahead of the vote. “We must make a quick return.“