Paris—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, at odds
over Jewish colonies, made no apparent dent in
the dispute as they sought to find ways to
revive Mideast peace efforts. The Israeli leader
said he would welcome talks with Syria as part
of the broader peace push, and Sarkozy called
the Palestinian president to urge renewed
nego-tiations with Israel, according to Israeli
media. However, growing international
frustration with the settlements is the central
reason peace efforts are log jammed, and there
was no public sign that Netanyahu’s trip this
week to Washington and then Paris produced any
break-throughs.
Tehran—Russia should honor a contract to sell a
missile defense sys-tem to Iran and not bend to
outside pressure, the Islamic Republic’s defense
minister said in remarks published on Thursday.
Russia, which is under Western pressure to
distance itself from Iran, has not followed
through on proposals to supply high-grade S-300
air defense missiles. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton praised Russia last month for not
providing the arms to Iran, which is at odds
with the West over its nuclear and missile
programs.
Bogota—Colombia brought
what it called threats of war from neighbor-ing
Venezuela to the U.N. Security Council after
Hugo Chavez, leader of the neighboring country,
told his army to get ready to fight. For months
Chavez has said that a military pact signed in
October between Bogota and Washington could set
the stage for a U.S. invasion of Venezuela from
Colom-bian territory. The United States and
Colombia dismiss that idea, saying their
cooperation is aimed strictly at combating drug
traffickers and Marxist insurgents within Co-lombia.
Rome—A U.N.
world food summit next week is likely to make
little headway in the fight against hunger, with
leaders simply pledging to boost agri-cultural
aid to poor countries but setting no targets or
deadlines for action. With more than one billion
people going hungry, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization had called the November
16-18 summit in Rome hoping to win firm pledges
by world leaders to spend $44 billion a year to
help poor nations feed themselves. But a final
draft declaration seen by Reuters includes only
a general commitment to pump more money into
agricultural development, and makes no mention
of a pro-posal to eliminate hunger by 2025.
I was born in 1945. My grandfather was a German
Jew. Fortunately, none of my immediate family
perished in the Holocaust. But its shadow hung
over me throughout my formative years. When I
began, in my teens, to meet with German
contemporaries, there was an initial reticence
and discomfort. But we talked and talked and
talked. There was no attempt to hide the past,
but there was a burning desire to make a
different future. It followed that I became an
ardent Europhile. Two decades ago, the Berlin
Wall was torn asunder by jubilant crowds.
