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During his tour of Europe, Netanyahu has so far heard criticism on the issue of the settlements from leaders considered "friends" - starting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and yesterday from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Advertisement "I am your friend and therefore I am speaking honestly," Sarkozy told Netanyahu during their meeting at the Elysee Palace. "You must conduct confidence building measures and the first must be the absolute freeze on construction in the settlements."

During his tour of Europe, Netanyahu has so far heard criticism on the issue of the settlements from leaders considered "friends" - starting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and yesterday from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Advertisement "I am your friend and therefore I am speaking honestly," Sarkozy told Netanyahu during their meeting at the Elysee Palace. "You must conduct confidence building measures and the first must be the absolute freeze on construction in the settlements."

The proposal that the prime minister is now considering, which Ariel Sharon had previously put forward, is to carry out a "territorial freeze" to settlement activity. In other words, the settlements will not expand onto more territory in an effort to meet the growing needs of settler population without leading to new "facts on the ground," which would stand as an obstacle to the creation of a future Palestinian state. Under this proposal, the only new structures in settlements would be for public functions, like kindergartens or schools.

Mousavi, 67, who was Iran's prime minister during the 1980s, has a reputation for being incorrupt. He has surprised analysts by emerging as a serious challenger to Ahmadinejad and is thought likely to coast to victory in Tehran, while the incumbent is strong in the countryside and small towns.

The contrast between the camps could not have been starker. Mousavi supporters are predominantly young and urbane. Many of the young women in the chain would be accused by conservatives of wearing "bad hijab" – meaning their compulsory head covering is only loosely attached.

"Ahmadinejad has done nothing good for our country," said Neda Ahmadi, 24, wearing blue eye make-up and a tight-fitting jacket and jeans beneath her hijab. "Musawi can improve Iran's relations with other countries and focus on our own people's needs."But Lida, another 24-year-old woman, who was at the president's rally, called him "a truthful man who leads a simple life". Iran she said, "has not been isolated but is showing itself as it wants other countries to see it".

The Turks, who always used to complain to their Western allies about their rough neighborhood, apparently no longer have any enemies in the east. Turkey's old rival Russia has since become its most important energy and trading partner. Syria and Iraq, two countries with which Ankara has in the past been on the brink of war, are now friends of Turkey, and relations are even improving with Armenia. The Arabs, who never truly took to the successors of the Ottomans, now look with admiration to what they call the "Turkish model," a dynamic, open country that has a better handle on its problems than they do.

When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed office in 2003, he planned to lead Turkey into the European Union. But Europe was unmoved by this vision, and it has also lost much of its appeal within Turkey. According to Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic Party, as the Europeans have become weary of expansion, Turkey has lost interest in joining the EU. Indeed, what Erdogan meant when he spoke of Turkey's "alternative" to becoming an EU member is becoming increasingly clear.

Critics and supporters alike describe this new course as "neo-Ottomanism." Ankara remains formally committed to its European ambitions. However, frustrated by the open rejection with which it has long been met in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and which it has been facing once again during the EU election campaign, Turkey is focusing increasingly on its role as a peacekeeping power in a region it either ruled or dominated for centuries.

Today, opinion polls put support for Self-Defense at just three percent in the upcoming European parliamentary elections.

Five years on from the EU's big eastward expansion, there's not a single new member state where fierce critics of Brussels can expect good results in the EU election. In fact, they will be lucky to win enough votes to cross the five percent threshold needed to get seats in the EU parliament in Strasbourg.

In addition to Lepper, Poland's League of Polish Families has also slipped under the five percent mark in opinion polls.

"In my vision of peace, two people live in good neighbourly relations, each with their own flag ... Neither threaten the other's security," he told his audience at Bar-Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv. "In any peace agreement, the territory under Palestinian control must be disarmed, with solid security guarantees for Israel."

Netanyahu called for "immediate negotiations for peace without prior arrangements" from the Palestinians, and said he was willing to meet Arab leaders anywhere to discuss the issue.

"I call the leaders of the Arab nations to co-operate with the Palestinians and with us on economic peace,"

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced he will back a Palestinian state - but only if it is completely demilitarised.He said a Palestinian state must have no army, no control of its air space and no way of smuggling in weapons. In a landmark speech, weeks after the US president urged him to agree a two-state plan, he said the Palestinians must accept Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinian leaders reacted angrily, accusing him of sabotaging peace plans.

our correspondent says the question is whether the White House regards this as sufficient to make up for the lack of movement on the issue of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

But in his speech at Bar-Ilan university Mr Netanyahu said settlers were not "enemies of peace" and did not move from his position of backing "natural growth" in existing settlements.

North Korea declared it would turn its plutonium stocks into weapons material and threatened military action against the US and its allies after the UN security council imposed new sanctions to punish Pyongyang for last month's underground nuclear test.

The country's foreign ministry today acknowledged for the first time that North Korea was developing a uranium enrichment programme and said it would be "impossible" to abandon its nuclear ambitions.In a defiant statement, it said that "the whole amount of the newly extracted plutonium [in the country] will be weaponised" and that "more than one-third of the spent fuel rods has been reprocessed to date".The ministry said the country had successfully started a programme to enrich uranium for a light-water reactor.The warning came a few hours after the security council unanimously passed a resolution banning all weapons exports from North Korea and the import of all but small arms.

North Korea described the sanctions as "yet another vile product of the US-led offensive of international pressure aimed at undermining ... disarming DPRK and suffocating its economy".

“I see the country’s political elite more divided than anytime in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Rafsanjani, one of the republic’s founding fathers, the man who made Khameini Supreme Leader, is now in the opposition.”

“At a political level what’s taking place now, among many other things, is the 20-year rivalry between Khamenei and Rafsanjani coming to a head,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s an Iranian version of the Corleones and the Tattaglias; there are no good guys and bad guys, only bad and worse.”

It seems clear that the 75-year-old is at the center of a fight for the future of the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rafsanjani’s vision of the state, and his position in his nation’s history, is being challenged by a new political elite led by Mr. Ahmadinejad and younger radicals who fought Iraq during the eight-year war.

The U.S. is moving ground-to-air missile defenses to Hawaii as tensions escalate between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea's recent moves to restart its nuclear-weapon program and resume test-firing long-range missiles.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday that the U.S. is concerned that Pyongyang might soon fire a missile toward Hawaii. Some senior U.S. officials expect a North Korean test by midsummer, even though most don't believe the missile would be capable of crossing the Pacific and reaching Hawaii.

Mr. Gates told reporters that the U.S. is positioning a sophisticated floating radar array in the ocean around Hawaii to track an incoming missile. The U.S. is also deploying missile-defense weapons to Hawaii that would theoretically be capable of shooting down a North Korean missile

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been raising eyebrows by telling one of the country's most famous artists how to paint better.Visiting 79-year-old artist Ilya Glazunov, Mr Putin stopped in front of a large painting of a medieval knight. "The sword is too short," he is reputed to have said. "It's only good enough for cutting sausage." Not wishing to displease his powerful guest, Mr Glazunov immediately agreed to correct his mistake.

In North Korea, they call it "on the spot guidance". It is when an all powerful-ruler drops by to give soldiers, scientists, farmers even artists advice on how to do their jobs properly.

Last week, he humiliated one of Russia's richest men on live television. He forced the billionaire businessman Oleg Deripaska to reopen an aluminium plant after protests by laid-off workers. As the cameras rolled, Mr Putin threw his pen on the table and ordered Mr Deripaska to sign the paperwork. It was a brilliant piece of political theatre, which went down extremely well with Russia's public who were delighted to see Mr Putin bringing the hated oligarch to heel.

The FTA with the United States was negotiated beginning in May of 2004 under the government of Alejandro Toledo (2000-2005). The treaty was slated to replace the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act signed in 2002 and in effect until December of 2006. The FTA eliminated obstacles to trade and facilitated access to goods and services and investment flows. Modeled on the North American free Trade Agreement, it also includes a broad range of issues linked to intellectual property, public contracting and services, and dispute resolution.5

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany's highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency "showed comprehensively" that "development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."

According to the judges, the BND supplemented its findings on August 28, 2008, showing "the development of a new missile launcher and the similarities between Iran's acquisition efforts and those of countries with already known nuclear weapons programs, such as Pakistan and North Korea."

A lower court in Frankfurt refused to try the case on the grounds that it was unlikely that Iran had a nuclear program at the time of the defendant's activities in 2007, citing the NIE report as evidence. That's why the Supreme Court judges had to rule first on the question of whether that program exists at all. Having answered that question in the affirmative, the court had to rule next on the likelihood of the defendant to be found guilty in a trial. The supreme court's conclusions are unusually strong. "The results of the investigation do in fact provide sufficient indications that the accused aided the development of nuclear weapons in Iran through business dealings."

Turkey's prime minister has described ethnic violence in China's Xinjiang region as "a kind of genocide"."There is no other way of commenting on this event," Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

The death toll from the violence there has now risen from 156 to 184, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reports. More than 1,000 people were injured.

"The event taking place in China is a kind of genocide," Mr Erdogan told reporters in Turkey's capital, Ankara. "There are atrocities there, hundreds of people have been killed and 1,000 hurt. We have difficulty understanding how China's leadership can remain a spectator in the face of these events."

Kissinger: The belief in democracy as a universal remedy regularly reappears in American foreign policy. Its most recent appearance came with the so-called neocons in the Bush administration. Actually, Obama is much closer to a realistic policy on this issue than Bush was.

Kissinger: Cynics treat values as equivalent and instrumental. Statesmen base practical decisions on moral convictions. It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble. But I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen. For me, a sensible definition of realpolitik is to say there are objective circumstances without which foreign policy cannot be conducted. To try to deal with the fate of nations without looking at the circumstances with which they have to deal is escapism. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

Kissinger: I see two possibilities. We will either come to an understanding with Iran, or we will clash. As a democratic society we cannot justify the clash to our own people unless we can show that we have made a serious effort to avoid it. By that, I don't mean that we have to make every concession they demand, but we are obligated to put forward ideas the American people can support.The upheaval in Teheran must run its course before these possibilities can be explored.

Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, said the North Korean announcement about restarting its nuclear facilities should come as "no surprise" to the United States. "The North Koreans had said that they were going to do this. The United States leadership made a mistake by going to the U.N. because the North Koreans said on March 26 that if we went to the U.N., they would resume their nuclear program," he said, referring to North Korea's recent decision to launch a rocket despite international opposition.

Harrison visited Pyongyang in January and doesn't expect North Korea to reprocess plutonium for at least a year. Nuclearization may not even be their primary goal with this latest announcement, he said. "You have to put it all into context of the North Korean situation, they want to negotiate to get economic help. All of this is a re-bargaining chip," he said. "The North Koreans are not hell-bent on nuclear weapons, this is just their opportunity, and they want to negotiate in bilateral talks with the US."

"The North Koreans have shut down the six-party talks, but they haven't ruled out bilateral negotiations," he said, referring to talks aimed at persuading North Korea to scrap its nuclear program. The talks involved China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

It has now been revealed the fruit, a type of orange-grapefruit hybrid marketed as Jaffa Sweetie, were not Israeli in the first place. The Sweeties were brought to Iran from China, where faking the origin of goods is a common practice.

A deadly outburst of violence appears to be overwhelming Iraq’s police and military forces as American troops hand over greater control of cities across the country to them. On Friday, twin suicide bombings killed at least 60 people outside Baghdad’s most revered Shiite shrine, pushing the death toll in one 24-hour period to nearly 150.

The bombings on Friday ominously echoed attacks like the one at a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed and pushed the country toward civil war.

The latest bombings — there have been at least 18 major attacks so far this month — so far have not prompted retaliatory attacks, but they have strained what remains a fragile society deeply divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

The Obama administration is set to intensify the torture debate by releasing scores of new pictures showing abuse of prisoners held by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.The pictures were taken between 2001 and 2006 at detention centres other than Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison, confirming that abuse was much more widespread than the US has so far been prepared to admit.

The Bush administration had repeatedly blocked through legal channels appeals from human rights groups for release of the pictures, which are held by the Army Criminal Investigation Division. But the Obama administration late yesterday lifted all legal obstacles and the pictures are to be published by 28 May.

The justice department has initially agreed to the release of 21 images of abuse at detention centres in Iraq and Afghanistan other than at Abu Ghraib and 23 other pictures. It added "the government is also processing for release a substantial number of other images". Up to 2,000 could be released.

North Korea has started to reprocess spent fuel rods at its nuclear plant, says the country's state media. The reprocessing is a possible move towards producing weapons grade plutonium and comes after Pyongyang's launch of a long-range rocket in April.

"The reprocessing of spent fuel rods from the pilot atomic power plant began as declared in the Foreign Ministry statement dated 14 April," North Korea's Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying.

The official said the reprocessing would "contribute to bolstering the nuclear deterrence for self-defence in every way to cope with the increasing military threats from the hostile forces".

to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it.

SPIEGEL: But one cannot claim that the German government is making any particular effort to stop climate change. The measures that have been introduced to date are insufficient to achieve the goal we have set for ourselves, a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Are you disappointed by Angela Merkel, the former climate chancellor?

Gabriel: Oh please. We are among a handful of countries in Europe that have exceeded their Kyoto climate protection goals for 2012 in 2008. And we never claimed that have already implemented all the measures that will be needed to reach our goal for the year 2020. We are still about five percentage points behind. But a great deal has been put in motion, from the expansion of renewable energy to the renovation of buildings. And just as an aside, these efforts have created 280,000 new jobs. Our counterparts in other countries, including South Africa, China and India, rate us in a completely different way and see us as role models. So why the criticism?