Washington—US
President Barack Obama will hold talks with
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Monday as US efforts to revive Middle East peace
talks appear in deep crisis. A White House
official announced the Oval Office meeting
shortly after the Israeli premier arrived in
Washington where he is planned to address a
Jewish gathering. The White House had previously
declined to confirm the summit, forcing Israeli
officials to deny that the absence of an
invitation would be a snub to hawkish Netanyahu.
Dresden (Germany)—Prosecutors on Monday
demanded a life sentence for a man who admitted
to fatally stabbing a pregnant Egyptian woman in
a German court in a case that triggered outrage
across the Muslim world. Prosecutor Frank
Heinrich said in closing arguments in Dresden
state court that the suspect acted out of hatred
for foreigners and deserved to be convicted and
given the maximum penalty. It’s clear that his
motive was hatred for Muslims,” Heinrich told
the panel of judges. “Like a maniacal,
cold-blooded killer, he started stabbing the
woman and her husband, who was trying to protect
her.”
Washington—The Obama administration’s upcoming
strategy for Afghanistan must focus on bringing
a sense of solace to the suffering people in the
region, a prominent expert South Asian affairs
said. There has to be a very serious review of
the strategy,” Mowahid Hussain Shah told an
American TV channel. Shah felt that President
Barack Obama, who has been weighing in on
various options for an effective way forward,
would authorise several thousand additional U.S.
troops for the conflict-torn Afghanistan as
“part of a broader counterinsurgency effort.”
Maldives—The president
of the Maldives has warned that a failure to
agree a deal on limiting greenhouse gas
emissions in Copenhagen next month would be an
act of “collective suicide”. “At the moment
every country arrives at climate negotiations
seeking to keep their own emissions as high as
possible,” President Mohamed Nasheed said here.
“This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for
collective suicide. We don’t want a global
suicide pact. We want a global survival pact.”
More than 190 nations are to meet for UN talks
in Copenhagen from December 7-18, aiming for a
post-2012 accord to slash emissions from fossil
fuels that trap solar heat and drive global
warming.
TWENTY years ago, the Berlin Wall opened, and
events moved so quickly that they seemed
inevitable. But were they? German unification is
a story about how leaders and diplomats moved
quickly to transform a political earthquake into
a new political and security order for Europe.
But it is also the story of how this statecraft
responded to and relied on the actions of the
German people. US diplomacy was guided by the
need to trust the German public as partners in
achieving unification.
