Jerusalem—More than
half of Israelis would support peace talks with
the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas if it
recognized Israel, a poll published on Friday
said. The results of the survey conducted by the
Israeli Dialog Institute seemed to suggest
Israelis were blaming Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas ri-val, for a deadlock in
peace talks, more than Israel’s rightist Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Haaretz
newspaper wrote.
Paris—A former French
minister convicted in the arms-to-Angola affair
said that ex-president Jacques Chirac knew about
the trade, holding up secret documents he
claimed prove his case. Charles Pasqua, who
served as interior minister in the 1980s and
again in the 1990s, named Chirac and other
senior government officials who he said were
aware of the weapons sales and did nothing to
stop them. “In 1995, Jacques Chirac, Dominique
de Villepin, Charles Millon, Herve de Charette
were informed of the arms sales to Angola,” said
Pasqua, now a senator. Villepin was Chirac’s
chief of staff at the time, Millon was the
defence minis-ter and De Charette foreign
minister.
Fort Hood—Military
investigators charged suspected Fort Hood
gun-man Nidal Hasan with 13 counts of
pre-meditated murder on Thursday over last
week’s shooting rampage at the Texas army base.
Hasan, an army psychiatrist who is being
investigated for links to militant Is-lam, will
be tried in a military court for the fatal
shootings of 12 soldiers and one civilian. “US
Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan has been charged
with 13 specifications of pre-meditated murder
under the military code of justice,” Chris Grey,
a spokesman for the army’s criminal
investigation division, told reporters. “We
still believe that there was only one gunman at
the scene involved in the actual shootings on
November 5th.”
Siem Reap—Cambodian
police said Friday they had charged a Thai man
with spying on fugitive ex-premier Thaksin
Shinawatra, further inflaming a diplomatic
crisis between the neighbouring countries. The
spy row blew up as Thaksin played a relaxed
round of golf with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun
Sen, underscoring Bangkok’s powerlessness to
make Phnom Penh extradite the billionaire and
get him to serve a jail term for graft. Siwarak
Chothipong, 31, who works for the Cambodia Air
Traffic Service, was ar-rested and charged
Thursday with supplying Thailand with details of
Thaksin’s flight schedule, said Cambodian
national police spokesman Kirt Chantharith.
THE United States has issued a clear warning to
Afghanistan’s president that he must fight
corruption, or may not get significantly more US
troops. But the Obama administration has a weak
hand as it seeks to play tough with few other
options if President Hamid Karzai refuses to go
along. A series of leaks Wednesday in
Washington, expressing strong misgivings about
Karzai, were a clear and public demand that the
Afghan president must begin cleaning up his
government before the US will commit to
bolstering the American troop presence. So far,
however, Karzai has shown little political will
to crack down on corruption, despite public
statements that he intends to rid his new
ad-ministration of abuses.
