Russia and the US are holding the first of three days of talks in Moscow on a new treaty aimed at reducing their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Senior diplomats need to hammer out a replacement for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start I) which expires in December.

Mr Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev agreed last month to pursue a deal to replace the Cold War-era Start I, signed in 1991.

Mr. Obama for the first time set out a rough timeline for talks with Iran, saying that by the end of the year the U.S. should have a "fairly good sense ... whether there is a good-faith effort to resolve differences" with Iran.

he two remained divided on issues such as the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Palestinians' right to statehood, and whether the Palestinian issue should take priority over concerns about Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Mr. Netanyahu said he would engage in peace talks with the Palestinians immediately, though he refused to come out in favor of a Palestinian state, in contrast to past government agreements. But he said any peace agreement would have to include Palestinian recognition of a Jewish state. A two-state solution is a centerpiece of Mr. Obama's Mideast peace strategy.

President Obama said Monday that he expected to know by the end of the year whether Iran was making “a good-faith effort to resolve differences” in talks aimed at ending its nuclear program, signaling to Israel as well as Iran that his willingness to engage in diplomacy over the issue has its limits.

“We’re not going to have talks forever,” Mr. Obama told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after a two-hour session in the Oval Office.

Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, told Mr. Obama that he was ready to resume peace talks with the Palestinians immediately, but only if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state.

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been accused of using quotes from the Bible in his briefings to George W Bush during the Iraq War.

The quotes were placed on the cover of the briefings alongside images of US soldiers, GQ magazine has reported.

The decision to put the biblical quotations on the cover pages was taken by Maj Gen Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both Mr Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to GQ.

Ethiopian military forces have crossed back into Somalia, barely three months after leaving, witnesses told the BBC.Their reported return comes as Islamist militants like al-Shabab continue to seize towns from the fragile Western-back transitional government.

The Ethiopian army withdrew in January after UN-backed peace talks. Its troops entered Somalia in 2006 to help oust Islamist forces from the capital Mogadishu.

On Sunday, Islamist militias took the key town of Jowhar from government forces. This is the home town of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and now that the country's rainy season has arrived, the town is also the only passable route into central Somalia from the capital.

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, met President Barack Obama yesterday and said that he wants to begin immediate peace talks with the Palestinians aimed at self-government, but he stopped short of explicitly committing Israel to Palestinian independence.

Obama said he told Netanyahu that the goal of "an extraordinary opportunity" for peace must be "allowing the Palestinians to govern themselves as an independent state".

"I want to start peace negotiations with the Palestinians immediately," he said. "I want to make it clear that we don't want to govern the Palestinians. We want to live in peace with them, we want them to govern themselves without [control over] a handful of powers that could endanger Israel. There'll have to be compromises by Israelis and Palestinians alike."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be prepared to endorse a peace process leading to an independent Palestinian state, his defence minister has said.Ehud Barak, a long-time rival now part of Israel's governing coalition, spoke ahead of Mr Netanyahu's first meeting with US President Obama in Washington. He told Israeli TV a regional deal could be struck within three years.

"Netanyahu will tell Obama: We're willing to engage in a process whose end is a regional peace accord," he told Channel 2 TV.

"The Arabs say 'two states,' [and] I don't see a reason why Netanyahu would not say that at the end of an accord... there will be two peoples living side by side in peace and mutual respect," he said.

David Miliband today described China as the 21st century's "indispensable power" with a decisive say on the future of the global economy, climate change and world trade.The foreign secretary predicted that over the next few decades China would become one of the two "powers that count", along with the US, and Europe could emerge as a third only if it learned to speak with one voice.

Miliband said a pivotal moment in China's rise came at the G20 summit last month in London. Hu Jintao, China's president, arrived as the head of the only major power still enjoying strong growth (expected to be 8% this year), backed by substantial financial reserves."The G20 was a very significant coming of economic age in an international forum for China. If you looked around the 20 ­people sitting at the table … what was striking was that when China spoke everybody listened," Miliband said.

"Historians will look back at 2009 and see that China played an incredibly important role in stabilising global capitalism. That is very significant and sort of ironic," Miliband said. "There's a joke that goes: 'After 1989, capitalism saved China. After 2009, China saved capitalism.'"

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

Bruce Riedel, the Brookings Institution scholar who served as the co-author of Mr. Obama’s review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, reflected the administration’s concern in a recent interview, saying that Pakistan “has more terrorists per square mile than anyplace else on earth, and it has a nuclear weapons program that is growing faster than anyplace else on earth.”

Members of al-Shabab, a group fighting government forces in Somalia, seized the town of Jowhar on Sunday morning.

Jowhar was in 2005 chosen as the temporary location for the country's transitional government.

The Somali government has been losing ground in recent weeks and now controls little more than the centre of the capital, with the support of African Union troops.

As a state senator in Chicago, Mr. Obama cultivated friendships with Arab-Americans, including Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar and a critic of Israel. Mr. Obama and Mr. Khalidi had many dinners together, friends said, in which they discussed Palestinian issues.

Mr. Obama’s predecessors, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, came of age politically with the American-Israeli viewpoint of the Middle East conflict as their primary tutor, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. While each often expressed concern and empathy for the Palestinians — with Mr. Clinton, in particular, pushing hard for Middle East peace during the last months of his presidency — their early perspectives were shaped more by Israelis and American Jews than by Muslims, Mr. Levy said. “I think that Barack Obama, on this issue as well as many other issues, brings a fresh approach and a fresh background,” Mr. Levy said. “He’s certainly familiar with Israel’s concerns and with the closeness of the Israel-America relationship and with that narrative. But what I think might be different is a familiarity that I think President Obama almost certainly has with where the Palestinian grievance narrative is coming from.”

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Obama will chart a course that is different from his predecessors’. During the campaign he struck a position on Israel that was indistinguishable from those of his rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain, going so far as to say in 2008 that he supported Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (He later attributed that statement to “poor phrasing in the speech,” telling Fareed Zakaria of CNN that he meant to say he did not want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.)

he top congressional Democrat on Thursday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of deceiving her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

The accusation pits House Speaker Nancy Pelosi against the CIA in a war of words over whether she was specifically told in September 2002 that waterboarding was being used on detainees. Republicans accuse her of being hypocritical for criticizing Bush-era interrogation techniques, and say she should have spoken out against them when she was first briefed if she opposed their use.

At a contentious news conference Thursday, Mrs. Pelosi said that during the 2002 briefing, "we were told that waterboarding was not being used." Mrs. Pelosi acknowledged that as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, she was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, about waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that critics, including President Barack Obama, call torture. But she said CIA officials told her and other lawmakers only that the Justice Department had concluded the procedure was legal.

Pope Benedict XVI became further entangled in Middle East politics on Thursday when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, urged him to denounce Iran.

“I asked him as a moral figure to make his voice heard loudly and continuously against the declarations coming from Iran about their intentions to destroy the state of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu told Israeli television after meeting Benedict

“It cannot be that at the start of the 21st century, a state arises that says it intends to destroy the Jewish state and that a very strong and aggressive voice isn’t heard condemning this phenomenon,” Mr. Netanyahu added. The Vatican has full diplomatic ties with Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a lightning visit to Jordan for talks with King Abdullah.The previously unannounced trip is the Israeli leader's second this week. He went to Egypt on Monday, his first time on foreign soil since taking office.

The Jordanian ruler pressed the Israeli premier to endorse a Palestinian state which so far he has decline to do.

"The king demanded the Israeli government declare its commitment to the two-state solution, accept the Arab peace initiative and take practical steps to achieve progress," King Abdullah's office said after the meeting.

Mohamed ElBaradei warns of new nuclear age Julian Borger, diplomatic editor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 May 2009 23.40 BST Article history The number of potential nuclear weapons states could more than double in a few years unless the major powers take radical steps towards disarmament, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog has warned.In a Guardian interview, Mohamed ElBaradei said the threat of proliferation was particularly grave in the Middle East, a region he described as a "ticking bomb".

The number of potential nuclear weapons states could more than double in a few years unless the major powers take radical steps towards disarmament, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog has warned.In a Guardian interview, Mohamed ElBaradei said the threat of proliferation was particularly grave in the Middle East, a region he described as a "ticking bomb".

ElBaradei, the outgoing director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart under its own inequity. "Any regime … has to have a sense of fairness and equity and it is not there," he said in an interview at his offices in Vienna.

President Obama said Wednesday that he would fight to prevent the release of photographs documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by United States military personnel, reversing his position on the issue after commanders warned that the images could set off a deadly backlash against American troops.

The administration said last month that it would not oppose the release of the pictures, but Mr. Obama changed his mind after seeing the photographs and getting warnings from top Pentagon officials that the images, taken from the early years of the wars, would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger troops in two war zones.

The decision in effect tossed aside an agreement the government had reached with the American Civil Liberties Union, which had fought to release photographs of incidents at Abu Ghraib and a half-dozen other prisons. The Justice Department informed the United States District Court in New York, which had backed the A.C.L.U.’s request, that it would appeal the ruling, citing “further reflection at the highest levels of government.”

The Obama administration and its European allies are setting a target of early October to determine whether engagement with Iran is making progress or should lead to sanctions, said senior officials briefed on the policy.

They also are developing specific benchmarks to gauge Iranian behavior. Those include whether Tehran is willing to let United Nations monitors make snap inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities that are now off-limits, and whether it will agree to a "freeze for freeze" -- halting uranium enrichment in return for holding off on new economic sanctions -- as a precursor to formal negotiations.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have stressed that U.S. overtures toward Tehran won't be open-ended. The administration is committed to testing Tehran's willingness to cooperate on the nuclear issue and on related efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq. Should diplomacy fail, the Obama administration has pledged to increase economic pressure. Mrs. Clinton recently testified that the U.S. will impose "crippling sanctions" on Iran if it doesn't negotiate.