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Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, said in Brussels on Monday that the group would reconsider its relationship with Israel if it did not remain committed to establishing a Palestinian state.

Mr. Lieberman also has few fans in Egypt, which has acted as an intermediary for Israel in several matters. Some months ago Mr. Lieberman complained that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had not agreed to come to Israel. “If he doesn’t want to, he can go to hell,” he added.“Imagine that Hossein Mousavi wins the Iranian presidency this spring and he names Mohammad Khatami as his foreign minister,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iran analyst in Israel, referring to two Iranian leaders widely viewed as in the pragmatist camp. “With Lieberman as foreign minister here, Israel will have a much harder time demonstrating to the world that Iran is the destabilizing factor in the region.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has already criticized Israeli plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, and her department has criticized Israel’s banning of certain goods from Gaza.This represents a distinct shift in tone from the Bush era. An internal Israeli Foreign Ministry report during the Gaza war noted that compared with others in the United States, “liberals and Democrats show far less enthusiasm for Israel and its leadership.”

Some Israeli officials say they believe that what the country needs is to “rebrand” itself. They say Israel spends far too much time defending actions against its enemies. By doing so, they say, the narrative is always about conflict.“When we show Sderot, others also see Gaza,” said Ido Aharoni, manager of a rebranding team at the Foreign Ministry. “Everything is twinned when seen through the conflict. The country needs to position itself as an attractive personality, to make outsiders see it in all its reality. Instead, we are focusing on crisis management. And that is never going to get us where we need to go over the long term.” Mr. Gilboa, the political scientist, said branding was not enough. “We need to do much more to educate the world about our situation,” he said. Regarding the extra $2 million budgeted for this, he said: “We need 50 million. We need 100 million.”

in a meeting with the Defense Ministry's top staff, Medvedev said Russia needed to push ahead with the changes because "serious potential for conflict remains in many regions." He cited the threat of terrorism and local crises such as the war with Georgia in August, as well as "attempts to expand the military infrastructure of NATO near Russia's borders."

government's plan to drastically reduce the number of officers, who now account for nearly one of three Russian soldiers. By eliminating hollow units that are supposed to call up conscripts in the event of war, the government plans to cut the officer corps from about 355,000 to 150,000, shedding more than 200 generals, 15,000 colonels and 70,000 majors. Meanwhile, the number of ground force units would be slashed from nearly 2,000 to less than 200.

Dozens of military academies, research institutes and hospitals would also be shut, and the overall size of the military would fall from about 1.13 million to 1 million.

Medvedev said the changes would address serious flaws in the military exposed by the Georgian war, the first time Russia has sent its forces to fight abroad since the fall of the Soviet Union. Though Russia easily triumphed in the five-day conflict, analysts say the Kremlin was alarmed by problems with aging weapons, communications and equipment, as well as the command structure.

Medvedev said arms procurement would be "almost entirely preserved" this year despite a budget shortfall but added that "large-scale rearming" would have to wait until 2011. Serdyukov said up to 90 percent of the weapons and equipment used by the military are outdated, and he pledged to bring that figure down to 70 percent by 2015.

“The most important goal is to prevent Mr. Ahmadinejad from re-election, not to get Mr. Khatami elected,” Mr. Leylaz said. “The chances of getting a reformist president elected would decrease if we have several candidates running.”

In the meeting on Sunday, Mr. Khatami told campaign staff members that Mr. Moussavi might stand a better chance of winning than he would, the Mehr news agency reported.“Opponents want to divide my supporters and supporters of Moussavi,” Mr. Khatami was quoted as saying. “It is not in our interest. Also, some conservatives are supporting Moussavi.”He added, “Moussavi is popular and will be able to execute his plans, and I prefer he stays in the race.”

Mr. Leylaz said that Mr. Moussavi’s announcement to run came unexpectedly last week, even though Mr. Khatami had consulted with him before announcing his own bid for the office on Feb. 8. Before the announcement, Mr. Khatami had said that he would run only if Mr. Moussavi did not, to avoid diluting the reformist vote.“Mr. Khatami was offended and felt betrayed,” Mr. Leylaz said.

Mr. Khatami, 65, won a landslide victory in 1997 and was in office for two terms until 2005. A charismatic leader, he was expected to draw considerable support in the coming election. More than 20,000 supporters showed up at his speech last week in the southern city of Shiraz, despite government restrictions.

Mr. Moussavi was the country’s prime minister from 1980 to 1988. He is well remembered by many Iranians for managing the country during its eight-year war with Iraq. His presidential platform is not yet clear, but in the past he supported protectionist economic policies.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is supported by the conservative Iranian establishment, but his economic policies have unleashed inflation of over 25 percent, and two major setbacks last week suggested that he might be losing support ahead of elections.

Last week, Parliament rejected a major element of his proposed budget to cut energy subsidies and to distribute the money directly among the poor.

The interventions from Obama capped an intensive lobbying effort for the bill by the White House and administration officials, Al Gore, and a broad coalition of environmental and business groups. The run-up had seen America's oil, gas and coal industry increase its lobbying budget by 50% in the first three months of the year to try to kill the bill. The spoiler campaign has run to hundreds of millions of dollars and involves industry front groups, lobbying firms, television, print and radio advertising, and donations to pivotal members of Congress.

The bill, now swollen to about 1,200 pages, would bind the US to reduce the carbon emissions from burning oil and coal by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80% by 2050.

t envisages measures to promote clean energy – from a development bank for new technology to new, greener building codes and targets for expanding the use of solar and wind power.

After the reduction of the original ­emissions-cut target to 17% and the granting of far more free pollution permits for the cap-and-trade scheme than originally envisioned, the most significant concessions include how farmers are rewarded for practices that reduce carbon ­emissions, and a four-year delay in new regulations that would have cut the profits of corn-based ethanol and encouraged the ­development of non-food biofuels instead.

On Monday, the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of Parliament was scheduled to visit the holy city of Qum to meet with two grand ayatollahs. A day earlier it met with two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in an effort to ease the strains that have developed since the June 12 election. The speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, a former nuclear negotiator, has emerged as a powerful opponent of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Earlier in the day, apparently in an attempt to create a semblance of fairness, state television said the Guardian Council had begun a random recount of 10 percent of the ballots in Tehran’s 22 electoral districts and in some provinces.

The nation’s intelligence chief charged that the protests were inspired by Western and “Zionist” forces, and Mr. Ahmadinejad called Monday for an investigation into the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young protester who became a symbol when a video of her dying moments in the streets was seen all over the world. Witnesses said she was shot by a member of the Basij, the government militia. But now the government is pressing an account that foreigners killed her to undermine its credibility.

On Sunday, the authorities arrested nine Iranian staff members of the British Embassy in Tehran, and while five had been released Monday, four remained in custody for what the intelligence service said were efforts to incite and organize the protests.But as the arrests ratcheted tensions up between Iran and the European Union, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman tried to ease back on Monday, however slightly. “Reduction of ties is not on our agenda with any European country, including Britain,” the spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, said.

Iran’s economy, even before the electoral crisis, was suffering from the drop in oil prices, with inflation of at least 15 percent — and by some estimates 25 percent — and damaging unemployment. On Sunday, the government announced that it had to end all subsidies for gasoline used by private vehicles, a decision that was expected, but given the timing, suggested serious strains to the state budget. Antagonizing the European Union, Iran’s largest trading partner, could do further damage.

He and others said that Israel agreed to the road map and to move ahead with the removal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 on the understanding that settlement growth could continue. But a former senior official in the Bush administration disagreed, calling the Israeli characterization “an overstatement.”“There was never an agreement to accept natural growth,” the official said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. “There was an effort to explore what natural growth would mean, but we weren’t able to reach agreement on that.”

The former official said that Bush administration officials had been working with their Israeli counterparts to clarify several issues, including natural growth, government subsidies to settlers, and the cessation of appropriation of Palestinian land. The United States and Israel never reached an agreement, though, either public or private, the official said.

A second senior Bush administration official, also speaking anonymously, said Wednesday: “We talked about a settlement freeze with four elements. One was no new settlements, a second was no new confiscation of Palestinian land, one was no new subsidies and finally, no construction outside the settlements.” He described that fourth condition, which applied to natural growth, as similar to taking a string and tying it around a settlement, and prohibiting any construction outside that string. But, he added, “We had a tentative agreement, but that was contingent on drawing up lines, and this is a process that never got done, therefore the settlement freeze was never formalized and never done.”A third former Bush administration official, Elliott Abrams, who was on the National Security Council staff, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post in April that seemed to endorse the Israeli argument.

But the Israeli officials complained that Mr. Obama had not accepted that the previous understandings existed. Instead, they lamented, Israel now stood accused of having cheated and dissembled in its settlement activity whereas, in fact, it had largely lived within the guidelines to which both governments had agreed.

On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” calling the American demand “unreasonable.”

Dov Weissglas, who was a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote an opinion article that appeared Tuesday in Yediot Aharonot, a mass-selling newspaper, laying out the agreements that he said had been reached with officials in the Bush administration.

He said that in May 2003 he and Mr. Sharon met with Mr. Abrams and Stephen J. Hadley of the National Security Council and came up with the definition of settlement freeze: “no new communities were to be built; no Palestinian lands were to be appropriated for settlement purposes; building will not take place beyond the existing community outline; and no ‘settlement encouraging’ budgets were to be allocated.”He said that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, signed off on that definition later that month

In April 2004, President Bush presented Mr. Sharon with a letter stating, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” That letter, Mr. Weissglas said, was a result of his earlier negotiations with Bush administration officials acknowledging that certain settlement blocks would remain Israeli and open to continued growth.

The Israeli officials said that no Bush administration official had ever publicly insisted that Israel was obliged to stop all building in the areas it captured in 1967. They said it was important to know that major oral understandings reached between an Israeli prime minister and an American president would not simply be tossed aside when a new administration came into the White House.Of course, Mr. Netanyahu has yet to endorse the two-state solution or even the road map agreed to by previous Israeli governments, which were not oral commitments, but actual signed and public agreements.

Mr. Abrams acknowledged that even within those guidelines, Israel had not fully complied. He wrote: “There has been physical expansion in some places, and the Palestinian Authority is right to object to it. Israeli settlement expansion beyond the security fence, in areas Israel will ultimately evacuate, is a mistake.”

At the time of the attack, it was known that Hariri, a billionaire construction magnate who was responsible for the reconstruction of the Lebanese capital after decades of civil war, wanted to reenter politics. It was also known that he had had a falling out with Syrian President Bashar Assad after demanding the withdrawal of Syrian occupation forces from his native Lebanon. As a result, the prime suspects in the murder were the powerful Syrian military and intelligence agency, as well as their Lebanese henchmen. The pressure on Damascus came at an opportune time for the US government. Then-President George W. Bush had placed Syria on his list of rogue states and wanted to isolate the regime internationally.

The establishment of a UN special tribunal was intended to provide certainty. It began its work on March 1, 2009. The tribunal, headquartered in the town of Leidschendam in the Netherlands, has a budget of more than €40 million ($56 million) for the first year alone, with the UN paying 51 percent and Beirut 49 percent of the cost. It has an initial mandate for three years, and the most severe sentence it can impose is life in prison. Canadian Daniel Bellemare, 57, was appointed to head the tribunal. Four of the 11 judges are Lebanese, whose identities have been kept secret, for security reasons.

As its first official act, the tribunal ordered the release, in early April, of the four men Mehlis had had arrested. By then, they had already spent more than three years sitting in a Lebanese prison.

Intensive investigations in Lebanon are all pointing to a new conclusion: that it was not the Syrians, but instead special forces of the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah ("Party of God") that planned and executed the diabolical attack. Tribunal chief prosecutor Bellemare and his judges apparently want to hold back this information, of which they been aware for about a month.

a secretly operating special unit of the Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area surrounding Hariri on the days leading up to the attack and on the date of the murder itself. The investigators referred to these mobile phones as the "first circle of hell."

They were apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack.

there was also a "second circle of hell," a network of about 20 mobile phones that were identified as being in proximity to the first eight phones noticeably often. According to the Lebanese security forces, all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the "operational arm" of Hezbollah, which maintains a militia in Lebanon that is more powerful than the regular Lebanese army.

The romantic attachment of one of the terrorists led the cyber-detectives directly to one of the main suspects. He committed the unbelievable indiscretion of calling his girlfriend from one of the "hot" phones. It only happened once, but it was enough to identify the man. He is believed to be Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, from the town of Rumin, a Hezbollah member who had completed training course in Iran. Ghamlush was also identified as the buyer of the mobile phones. He has since disappeared, and perhaps is no longer alive.

The European Union is one of the largest donors to the Palestinian Authority.

The commission says this year alone it has paid more than 200 million euros ($280 million) to help cover the Palestinian budget deficit

"The Italian preparations for the summit have been chaotic from start to finish," said Richard Gowan, an analyst at the Centre for International Co-operation at New York University.

The behind-the-scenes grumbling has gone as far as suggestions that Italy could be pushed out of the G8 or any successor group. One possibility being floated in European capitals is that Spain, which has higher per capita national income and gives a greater percentage of GDP in aid, would take Italy's place.

"The G8 is a club, and clubs have membership dues. Italy has not been paying them," said a European official involved in the summit preparations.

Critics say Italy's Berlusconi government has made up for the lack of substance by increasing the size of the guest list. Estimates of the numbers of heads of state coming to L'Aquila range from 39 to 44."This is a gigantic fudge," Gowan said. "The Italians have no ideas and have decided that best thing to do is to spread the agenda extremely thinly to obscure the fact that didn't really have an agenda."

Silvio Berlusconi has come in for harsh criticism for delivering only 3% of development aid promises made four years ago, and for planning cuts of more than 50% in Italy's overseas aid budget.

The heavy criticism of Italy comes at a time when the future of the G8 as a forum for addressing the world's problems is very much in question. At the beginning of the year the G20 group, which included emerging economies, was seen as a possible replacement, but the G20 London summit in April convinced US officials it was too unwieldy a vehicle.

The most likely replacement for the G8 is likely to be between 13- and 16-strong, including rising powers such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, which currently attend meetings as the "outreach five" But any transition would be painful as countries jostle for a seat. Italy's removal is seen in a possibility but Spanish membership in its place is unlikely. The US and the emerging economies believe the existing group is too Euro-centric already, and would prefer consolidated EU representation. That is seen as unlikely. No European state wants to give up their place at the table..

Attacks like these -- or U.S. awareness of them -- appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter.

while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren't able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.

Former U.S. officials say the attacks appear to have originated in China. However it can be extremely difficult to determine the true origin because it is easy to mask identities online.

A Pentagon report issued last month said that the Chinese military has made "steady progress" in developing online-warfare techniques. China hopes its computer skills can help it compensate for an underdeveloped military, the report said.

The Chinese Embassy said in a statement that China "opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes." It called the Pentagon's report "a product of the Cold War mentality" and said the allegations of cyber espionage are "intentionally fabricated to fan up China threat sensations."

The U.S. has no single government or military office responsible for cyber security. The Obama administration is likely to soon propose creating a senior White House computer-security post to coordinate policy and a new military command that would take the lead in protecting key computer networks from intrusions, according to senior officials.

The Bush administration planned to spend about $17 billion over several years on a new online-security initiative and the Obama administration has indicated it could expand on that.

The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning II, is the costliest and most technically challenging weapons program the Pentagon has ever attempted. The plane, led by Lockheed Martin Corp.

Six current and former officials familiar with the matter confirmed that the fighter program had been repeatedly broken into. The Air Force has launched an investigation.

Foreign allies are helping develop the aircraft, which opens up other avenues of attack for spies online. At least one breach appears to have occurred in Turkey and another country that is a U.S. ally, according to people familiar with the matter.

Joint Strike Fighter test aircraft are already flying, and money to build the jet is included in the Pentagon's budget for this year and next.

Computer systems involved with the program appear to have been infiltrated at least as far back as 2007, according to people familiar with the matter. Evidence of penetrations continued to be discovered at least into 2008. The intruders appear to have been interested in data about the design of the plane, its performance statistics and its electronic systems, former officials said.

The intruders compromised the system responsible for diagnosing a plane's maintenance problems during flight, according to officials familiar with the matter. However, the plane's most vital systems -- such as flight controls and sensors -- are physically isolated from the publicly accessible Internet, they said.

The intruders entered through vulnerabilities in the networks of two or three contractors helping to build the high-tech fighter jet, according to people who have been briefed on the matter. Lockheed Martin is the lead contractor on the program, and Northrop Grumman Corp. and BAE Systems PLC also play major roles in its development.

The spies inserted technology that encrypts the data as it's being stolen; as a result, investigators can't tell exactly what data has been taken. A former Pentagon official said the military carried out a thorough cleanup.

Investigators traced the penetrations back with a "high level of certainty" to known Chinese Internet protocol, or IP, addresses and digital fingerprints that had been used for attacks in the past, said a person briefed on the matter.

As for the intrusion into the Air Force's air-traffic control systems, three current and former officials familiar with the incident said it occurred in recent months. It alarmed U.S. national security officials, particularly at the National Security Agency, because the access the spies gained could have allowed them to interfere with the system, said one former official. The danger is that intruders might find weaknesses that could be exploited to confuse or damage U.S. military craft.

In his speech in Austin, Mr. Brenner, the U.S. counterintelligence chief, issued a veiled warning about threats to air traffic in the context of Chinese infiltration of U.S. networks. He spoke of his concerns about the vulnerability of U.S. air traffic control systems to cyber infiltration, adding "our networks are being mapped." He went on to warn of a potential situation where "a fighter pilot can't trust his radar."

One member of the European Parliament's budget committee said it was "a huge scandal" given that "normal people" weren't compensated for losses sustained by their pension funds in the financial crisis.

Public money already makes up two thirds of the pension fund. At the moment, each MEP is required to make monthly contributions of €1,194.59 ($1550) into their retirement funds, while the parliament itself makes a matching contribution of double that amount.

"All this crossfire shows what I really stand for is our own national interest," she says. Then she is quick to add: "The Russians worry that we are trying to privatize our pipelines by stealth, but that's not the case and would be illegal. We have to reassure them on that."

"There is no doubt we want to join the EU. At least 60 percent of our public opinion favors this option, and we are now closer to this goal than, say, one year ago. This policy must be the essence of all our actions," she says. But, she warns, it cannot succeed by confronting Moscow or ignoring its concerns.

They want to focus on tougher regulation of the financial community. They want the summit to start re-writing the global rulebook on capitalism.

The intriguing thing is that the economic crisis and Brown's lining up with Obama, who has proclaimed his belief in the enduring "special relationship" with Britain, has revived the Franco-German alliance which used to dominate EU affairs and which had seemed to wither under Merkel and Sarkozy. She doesn't like his touchy-feely ways, he finds her incremental style of politics frustrating. They had drifted apart, but they are back sharing a political tent.

The big question on the fiscal stimulus front is: What will China do?

Brown's hope is that China, worried about the safety of its money invested in the U.S., will be ready to commit extra funds to fighting the world recession. But if he agrees to do so, President Hu Jintao will surely exact a price.

If China comes up with the money to help, it will need assurances that it will in the future enjoy greater power within such multilateral institutions as the IMF and the World Bank. The U.S. and Europe, who have dominated the G-8, now have little option too but to accept a new world order.

Whatever the outcome in London it is unlikely now that the G-8 alone will ever carry the same sway. And not surprisingly, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who hosts this summer's G-8 in Sardinia, has proposed that its gathering should be immediately followed by one of the G-20.

the opposition within America is potentially substantial, and might be hardened if Obama looks like he is presenting Congress with a fait accompli.There are thought to be as many as 15 Democratic senators who represent "rust-belt" states dependent on coal mining, steel production and heavy manufacturing, all big emitters of carbon.

There have also been suggestions that the cost of any climate change legislation may be higher than the $646bn (£444bn) suggested by the Obama administration.

Mr. Topolanek’s comments during a speech to the European Parliament underscored unresolved differences.

Mr. Topolanek’s remarks were considered impolitic, with the German leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, telling him, “You have not understood what the task of the E.U. presidency is,” and describing his comments as “not the level on which the E.U. ought to be operating with the United States.”

A Czech spokesman said that Mr. Topolanek meant to say that the European Union would be on the way to hell if it increased its own spending too much, rather than predicting that the United States was doomed.

Mr. Topolanek is not alone in his concern that Mr. Obama’s stimulus package, which will push the United States budget deficit this year to 10 percent or more of gross domestic product, will put a huge strain on global financial markets. German officials have also criticized the evolving American program, and many other European nations have declined to create fiscal stimulus programs anywhere near as large as that of the United States, arguing that too much extra money will lead quickly to inflation.