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By Tuesday night, the seat of government had been badly battered and scores of people had been injured. But riot police had regained control of the president’s offices and Parliament Wednesday.

Young people have increasingly used the Internet to mobilize politically; cellphones and text messages helped swell protests in Ukraine in 2004, and in Belarus in 2006.

The immediate cause of the protests were parliamentary elections held on Sunday, in which Communists won 50 percent of the vote, enough to allow them to select a new president and amend the Constitution. Though the Communists were expected to win, their showing was stronger than expected, and opposition leaders accused the government of vote-rigging.

Election observers from the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had tentatively accepted the voting as fair, though they expressed some concern about interference from the authorities. But the results were a deep disappointment in the capital, where Communist candidates lost the last round of municipal elections.

Behind the confrontation is a split in Moldova’s population. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought benefits to much of Eastern Europe, but in Moldova it ushered in economic decline and instability. In 2001, angry citizens backed the return of the Communists and their social programs.

But Moldova remained desperately poor, and young people flocked overseas to work. They have looked to the West as the best path to economic stability and have defied Mr. Voronin’s government by urging closer integration with Romania.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it an anti-Communist movement,” Mr. Patterson said. “This really is a generational squeeze. It’s not really the Communists versus the opposition. It’s the grandmothers versus the grandkids.”

This week, the president opened the door to the discussions by abandoning longstanding restrictions on the ability of Cuban-Americans to travel freely to the island and send money to relatives there.

“I know there is a longer journey that must be traveled in overcoming decades of mistrust, but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he was “prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues — from human rights, free speech, and democratic reform to drugs, migration, and economic issues.”

He said the United States needed to acknowledge long-held suspicions that it has interfered in the affairs of other countries. But, departing from his prepared text, he also said the region’s countries needed to cease their own historic demonization of the United States for everything from economic crises to drug violence.“That also means we can’t blame the United States for every problem that arises in the hemisphere,” he said. “That’s part of the bargain. That’s the old way, and we need a new way.”

On Cuba, the president’s words were as notable for what he said as for what he did not say. He did not scold or berate the Cuban government for holding political prisoners, as his predecessor, George W. Bush, often did.

But he also did not say that he was willing to support Cuba’s membership in the Organization of American States, or lift the 47-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, as some hemisphere leaders here want him to do.

“Let me be clear,” he said. “I am not interested in talking for the sake of talking. But I do believe we can move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new direction.”

The new tone from Washington drew warm praise from leaders like President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. Mr. Ortega, who said he felt ashamed that he was participating in the summit meeting without the presence of Cuba, evoked images of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, saying, “I am convinced that wall will collapse, will come down.”

Mrs. Kirchner praised Mr. Obama for “what you did to stabilize the relationship from the absurd restrictions imposed by the Bush administration,” adding: “We sincerely believe that we in the Americas have a second opportunity to construct a new relationship. Don’t let it slip away.”

Mr. Obama’s speech on Friday night was only the latest in a string of overtures between the countries. On Thursday, Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president, used unusually conciliatory language in describing the Obama administration’s decision to lift restrictions on family travel and remittances.

“We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about, but as equals, without the smallest shadow cast on our sovereignty, and without the slightest violation of the Cuban people’s right to self-determination,” Mr. Castro said in Venezuela during a meeting of leftist governments meant as a counterpoint to this weekend’s summit meeting in Trinidad and Tobago.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton responded, saying, “We welcome his comments, the overture that they represent, and we’re taking a very serious look at how we intend to respond.”

Earlier this week Brazilian officials signaled in Rio de Janeiro that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, potentially flanked by the Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, would raise the issue of accepting Cuba into the Organization of American States at the summit meeting. Cuba’s “absence is an anomaly and he is waiting for this situation to be corrected,” Marco Aurélio García, Mr. da Silva’s foreign policy adviser, told reporters.

On Friday, the secretary general of the O.A.S., José Miguel Insulza, said he would call for Cuba to be readmitted. And Mr. Chávez recently said he would refuse to sign the official declaration produced at the summit meeting because Cuba was not invited.

Then there is Cyprus, but the real problem here is between Turkey and the European Union. Europe wants Turkey to open its ports and airports to the Greek Cypriots. Turkey wants Europe to ease the commercial isolation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in exchange, but the Greek Cypriots veto this. The United States can offer its support and its good offices, but it does not have much leverage over either the European Union or the Greek Cypriots. This is also broadly true of Turkey's EU entry negotiations.

A final item is the Nabucco pipeline bringing Central Asian gas to Europe via Turkey. Both America and Turkey would like to see it built. The question, however, is who will pay for it? Neither America nor Turkey has much spare cash right now.

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.

To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same

Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies -- including the Czech Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.

Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy.

The new posture of the Israeli government is certain to complicate the already tenuous position of Palestinian moderates, foremost among them President Mahmoud Abbas, who has staked everything on the two-state solution. "This minister is an obstacle to peace," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, an aide to Mr Abbas. "Nothing obliges us to deal with a racist person hostile to peace."

Tzipi Livni, who in the previous government oversaw the final status negotiations and was present in the Foreign Ministry yesterday, told Mr Lieberman that "your speech has proven to me that I did the right thing by not joining [a national unity government]".

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has been especially unhelpful, making clear that he will do all he can to keep Turkey out of the European Union.

Ankara has played a positive role, mediating indirect talks between Israel and Syria. With Washington’s encouragement, Mr. Erdogan could also use his relationships with Iran, Sudan and Hamas to encourage improved behavior.

We are concerned about Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic tendencies. His government’s decision to slap the media mogul Aydin Dogan with a $500 million tax bill smacks of retaliation against an independent press that has successfully exposed government corruption.

Mr. Obama must persuade Mr. Sarkozy and others that admitting Turkey — a Muslim democracy — is in everyone’s interest. And he must persuade Ankara that the required reforms will strengthen Turkey’s democracy and provide more stability and growth.

Turkey’s cooperation with Iraqi Kurds has vastly improved. There are also reports that Turkey and Armenia may soon normalize relations.

We have long criticized Turkey for its self-destructive denial of the World War I era mass killing of Armenians. But while Congress is again contemplating a resolution denouncing the genocide, it would do a lot more good for both Armenia and Turkey if it held back. Mr. Obama, who vowed in the presidential campaign to recognize the event as genocide, should also forbear.

The contrast is striking. Only four years ago, George W. Bush, in his second Inaugural Address, described what he called America's "considerable" influence, saying, "We will use it confidently in freedom's cause." Bush's vision of American power was combative and aggressive. He said the U.S. would "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." He continued, "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom."

Obama, by contrast, is looking for collaboration. He is looking to build a collective vision, not to impose an American one.

But even though European monitors have long been on the ground, Russia still holds large areas that had irrefutably been under Georgian control, and thousands of Georgians have not been allowed free access to homes far from the disputed territory where the war began.

Several areas under Russian control are at odds with the terms of the cease-fire plan. The most obvious examples are in the Kodori Gorge and the agricultural valley outside the town of Akhalgori

Gilles Janvier, deputy head of the European monitoring mission, said in an interview that Russia had told diplomats that it had entered its own military agreement with the two breakaway regions in Georgia, which the Kremlin recognizes as independent states, and that these newer arrangements rendered the troop withdrawal component of the cease-fire plan obsolete.

“They say there is now a new bilateral agreement between them and South Ossetian and Abkhaz forces that lets them station troops,” Mr. Janvier said.

A senior American official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the subject in her meeting in early March with Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, to no apparent effect.

Vague low-carbon language and climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December were relegated to two paragraphs at the communique's end.

Some critics also pointed out that the summit failed to produce a co-ordinated plan to purge the global banking system of billions of dollars of toxic assets, and suggested that regulation of the financial industry should have gone further.

Brown said that the existing agreed fiscal stimulus will amount to $5tn by 2010, and the measures will raise world output by 4% by the end of next year.

The prime minister also won agreement from other G20 world leaders that the International Monetary Fund will monitor the existing stimulus,

Overall, the resources of the IMF will be trebled from $250bn to $700bn, following the lifting by the US of years of opposition. In a sign of the shift in world power, China agreed to provide $40bn of the new loans given to the IMF, with more to come from Saudi Arabia.

At the centre of the deal was a six-point plan:• Reform of the global banking system, with controls on hedge funds, better accounting standards, tighter rules for credit rating agencies, and immediate naming-and-shaming of tax havens that fail to share information.• A global common approach to dealing with toxic assets that impair the ability of banks to lend.• A $1.1tn package to supplement the $5tn stimulus to the global economy by individual countries. The $1.1tn will allow the IMF, the World Bank and others to increase lending to vulnerable countries. There will be a tenfold increase to $250bn in the IMF's facility allowing members to borrow from other countries' foreign currency reserves.• More power for leading developing countries within the IMF and World Bank, to end the stranglehold of the US and Europe on their top jobs.• $200bn of trade finance over two years to help reverse the steepest decline in world trade since 1945, with cash from a range of public and private sources.• A pledge that the fiscal stimulus, including the sale of gold by the IMF due to raise $6bn, will give help to the poorest nations and create green jobs.

Nicolas Sarkozy said the summit meant that the era of secrecy by banks was over; "great progress" had been made, he said, and the page had been turned on the economic model which had dominated since Bretton Woods in 1944 created the world's institutional framework."Since Bretton Woods, the world has been living on a financial model, the Anglo-Saxon model. It's not my place to criticise it, it has its advantages [but] clearly today a page has been turned," he said.

The summit's biggest loser may have been the fight against climate change. Diplomatic sources said China led the opposition to green language in the final communique. David Norman, the WWF campaigns director, claimed that the summit had been "a huge missed opportunity".

Lieberman has taken the idea of two states for two peoples to an extreme. He seeks an Israel that effectively is not only predominantly Jewish, but one that is almost entirely Jewish. Lieberman imagines a transfer of some Israeli cities with Arab populations bordering the 1967 green line out of the Israeli polity, but to where? His prime minister has ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

More broadly, the mix of official government opposition to Palestinian independence, open discussion of ethnic separation, and the almost apocalyptic discourse being promoted by Israeli academics such as Benny Morris are creating a Balkan-like situation within Israel proper that could quickly eclipse the situation in the occupied territories as a threat to international peace and stability if allowed to continue.

sraeli leaders and their advocates have already promoted a full-court blitz demanding that the United States "stop" Iran, or Israel will be forced to do so on its own. In part, this is bluster, as few analysts believe Israel is able to attack Iran on its own, and no one believes that Iran wouldn't retaliate, which would force the United States into the middle of the conflict. However, this emphasis on Iran serves another useful purpose for Netanyahu and Lieberman: Not only does it remove Palestinian independence and potential Israeli peace treaties with the Arab world from U.S. focus, but it sets the agenda for the U.S.-Israeli talks that are to take place this May.

Dealing with a hostile and recalcitrant enemy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is hard enough, but the Obama administration may find that dealing with a hostile and recalcitrant ally brings its own set of challenges.

Baitullah Mehsud warned the attacks would continue in Pakistan and threatened future attacks on American soil, while he shrugged off the risk of "martyrdom".

Different Taleban factions in the border region, including Baitullah Mehsud's, have joined forces in readiness to confront the planned American troop increase in Afghanistan, she says. Meanwhile, as the Pakistan government attempts to build a national consensus to fight the Taleban, it is faced with trying to overcome deep opposition among its people to an American role in that struggle.

But when the emir of Qatar switched off his microphone, Col Gaddafi insisted that he could not be denied the right to address the summit as - he called himself - the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims.

Arab leaders have concluded their annual summit by showing their support for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes. The Arab League said it rejected the International Criminal Court's decision to issue a warrant for his arrest. President Bashir had earlier spoken at the summit in Qatar, and won strong support from his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.

earlier reports that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had stormed out of the Arab League summit were incorrect. But, our correspondent says, Mr Gaddafi used the floor to settle old scores, criticising Saudi King Abdullah and appearing to reignite a public spat he had at the 2003 Arab summit. At Monday's opening session he called the king a British product and an American ally. But he added that he now considered their "problem" over and was ready to reconcile, drawing applause from the other delegates. The two leaders appeared to bury the hatchet with a 30 minute face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the summit, reports said.

At the end of the summit a joint statement by the Arab League said: "We stress our solidarity with Sudan and our rejection of the ICC (International Criminal Court) decision." Earlier in the day, Syrian President Assad said those who had "committed massacres and atrocities in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon" should be arrested first.

In his opening remarks, Syria's President Assad also spoke about Israel - saying the Arab world had no "real partner in the peace process".

And, then, there is the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, which serves as logistics hub for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's also the fact that Turkey's proximity to the central-Asian countries that are rich in raw materials makes it an important transit hub in the energy supply.

Then, of course, there's the issue of Iran. Ankara nurtures strong ties with the country, meaning that Turkey could play a role in facilitating new diplomatic overtures between Washington and Tehran.

Turkey's government has already helped to organize talks between high-level officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to negotiate a cease-fire in the Gaza conflict.

According to poll figures, more than half of all Turks think Obama is the most trustworthy foreign statesman

America's reputation has suffered major damage in Turkey, particularly as a result of its disastrous invasion of Iraq. When Obama was elected president, polls indicated that only 9 percent of Turkey's population approved of Washington's policies. America's efforts to aid Turkey's ambition to become part of the EU have impressed few Turks, particularly since progress has been so sluggish.

"Obama should treat Turkey as more than a Muslim country," says Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. As he sees it, it was a good idea for Obama to visit Turkey right after attending meetings with NATO and EU representatives as a way of underscoring the country's close ties with the West.

last year, Swiss mediators helped Turkish and Armenian diplomats hammer out a comprehensive agreement that would envision a historic coming to terms with the events of 1915 -- as well as to clear the path for the resumption of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia.

But the authors of Tracking GhostNet argue that things may not be as they seem in the world of electronic espionage. "We're a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms," said Ronald Deibert from the University of Toronto. "This could well be the CIA or the Russians.

The 10-month investigation also detected bugged computers in the foreign ministries of several countries, including Iran and Indonesia, and in the embassies of India, South Korea, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan

At the same time, American officials told The New York Times this week that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency continued to offer money, supplies and guidance to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan as a proxy to help shape a friendly government there once American forces leave.

The new Taliban alliance has raised concern in Afghanistan, where NATO generals warn that the conflict will worsen this year. It has also generated anxiety in Pakistan, where officials fear that a united Taliban will be more dangerous, even if focused on Afghanistan, and draw more attacks inside Pakistan from United States drone aircraft. “This may bring some respite for us from militants’ attacks, but what it may entail in terms of national security could be far more serious,” said one senior Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not permitted to talk to news organizations. “This would mean more attacks inside our tribal areas, something we have been arguing against with the Americans.”

The Pakistani Taliban is dominated by three powerful commanders — Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulavi Nazir — based in North and South Waziristan, the hub of insurgent activity in Pakistan’s tribal border regions, who have often clashed among themselves.

Mullah Omar dispatched a six-member team to Waziristan in late December and early January, several Taliban fighters said in interviews in Dera Ismail Khan, a town in North-West Frontier Province that is not far from South Waziristan. The Afghan Taliban delegation urged the Pakistani Taliban leaders to settle their internal differences, scale down their activities in Pakistan and help counter the planned increase of American forces in Afghanistan, the fighters said. The three Pakistani Taliban leaders agreed. In February, they formed a united council, or shura, called the Council of United Mujahedeen. In a printed statement the leaders vowed to put aside their disputes and focus on fighting American-led forces in Afghanistan.