Foreign

JERUSALEM
Israel needs good ties with the US to survive and must be more understanding of US demands over securing peace with the Palestinians, Israeli President Shimon Peres said on Friday.
Peres said an end to the Palestinian conflict would improve the US' own security position in the Middle East and help isolate Iran. His comments came as a diplomatic deadlock deepened over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to bow to demands from Washington to extend a freeze

WASHINGTON
Special codes that allow the US president to order a nuclear attack went missing "for months" during Bill Clinton's time at the White House, his former top military officer says in a memoir.
The nuclear authorization codes, known as the "biscuit," are supposed to remain close to the US president at all times and are safeguarded by one of his aides. "At one point during the Clinton administration - and until this day, to my knowledge this has never been released -

SAINT MARC
A cholera epidemic in northern Haiti has claimed 135 lives and infected 1,500 people, an official said Thursday amid concerns of a wider outbreak in the impoverished nation.
The epidemic has grown in the past few days but has not yet reached the major displaced persons camps in and around the capital Port-au-Prince, which was ravaged by a 7.0 earthquake in January that left 1.2 million people homeless.
But officials fear an outbreak in densely populated tent

PARIS
French riot police rushed picket lines to break a blockade of the main fuel refinery supplying Paris on Friday as unions hardened their stance before a vote on President Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reform.
Signalling their determination to keep fighting even after a bill raising the retirement age becomes law, the country's six main unions have called for two more days of action on October 28 and November 6 against the unpopular reform.
"The protests are not

NAPLES
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi pledged a swift end to the Naples garbage crisis on Friday as TV pictures of piles of rubbish and angry protests put his struggling government under pressure.
At least 20 police officers were injured on Thursday and there was further violence overnight as the chronic problem of waste disposal in Italy's third largest city flared into violence for another night.
Hundreds of tonnes of garbage lie uncollected in the

COTABATO
Nine people were killed on Thursday when a bomb exploded aboard a packed passenger bus in the troubled southern Philippines, authorities said.
The military and police said Muslim militants or bandits who are known to operate on the southern island of Mindanao could have been behind the attack, with extortion the likely motive.
"The bus company has long been receiving extortion letters from armed groups operating in the region," regional military spokesman

BEIJING
China refused to say on Thursday whether Premier Wen Jiabao will meet Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at a regional summit this month, and a Chinese diplomat accused Japanese foreign affairs minister of rekindling ill-will.
The swipe at Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara by Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Hu Zhengyue exposed the prickly tensions that still dog ties between Asia's two biggest economies, despite their efforts to overcome a maritime dispute.

TEHRAN
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone call that the aim of his controversial visit to Lebanon last week was to promote its unity, his office said on Thursday.
The Wednesday evening conversation between the two leaders their second in eight days came as the regional arch-rivals have been competing for influence in both Lebanon and Iraq.
Praising King Abdullah's own visit to Lebanon in July, Ahmadinejad said: "We too have now

PARIS
French protestors blocked key sites and clashed with police Thursday as unions called for further mass nationwide protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy's bid to raise the retirement age.
With no fuel left in more than a quarter of petrol pumps, police are playing what unions dubbed a game of cat and mouse with protestors at depots and refineries in a bid to prevent the country grinding to a halt.
"By taking the French economy, businesses and daily life

STRASBOURG: European lawmakers voting amid a sea of pink and blue baby balloons, gave their blessing to hotly contested plans for all new mothers across Europe to have five months of maternity leave.
Some governments have warned the 20-week fully paid leave will add a huge burden to hard-pressed taxpayers, while business leaders say it may work against giving jobs to women in the long term.
In a first reading of the proposal, a large majority of MEPs voted in favour of

LONDON: Britain said on Wednesday it would cut half a million public sector jobs, raise the retirement age and slash the welfare state as part of the biggest spending cuts in a generation.
After months of bitter negotiations, Conservative finance minister George Osborne confirmed he would press ahead with almost all the spending cuts he had outlined in a June budget.
Capital spending, however, he said would be 2 billion pounds higher per year than originally planned

PARIS: Israel's Labour Party would walk out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government if peace talks with the Palestinians do not resume by the end of the year, a senior party figure said.
"We will force the Labour Party to move out," Minorities Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman, who intends to challenge Defence Minister Ehud Barak for Labour's leadership, told Reuters.
"I will do everything I can," he said in an interview at a left-wing think tank in Paris. "I

PARIS: President Nicolas Sarkozy sent in police on Wednesday to clear blockades at France's fuel depots that have caused petrol shortages as unions kept up resistance to an unpopular pension reform due for a final vote this week.
Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said three major depots were unblocked overnight and Sarkozy said it would not let the country be paralysed by protests against a bill that seeks to raise the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60.
"If this disorder

GENEVA: A UN expert group on mercenaries on Tuesday urged the United States to exercise stronger official control over private security contractors in Afghanistan.
The UN Working Group on the use of mercenaries welcomed a US Senate committee report this month which found that Washington had failed to manage those hired to provide security under contracts worth billions of dollars, with disastrous results.
However, the chairman of the UN body, Alexander Nikitin, said it was

DEAUVILLE: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed on Tuesday to attend next month's NATO summit and said Moscow was prepared to discuss the Alliance's proposed anti-missile shield.
Medvedev was speaking in the elegant French seaside resort of Deauville after talks with French and German leaders that were partly overshadowed by news of a bloody separatist attack in the Russian republic of Chechnya. President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted Medvedev in order

LONDON: Britain is to scrap major defence assets like its flagship aircraft carrier and fleet of Harrier jets in a defence review being announced Tuesday as part of stinging, across-the-board government cuts.
Prime Minister David Cameron will tell the House of Commons from 1430 GMT the HMS Ark Royal is to be decommissioned almost immediately, while a decision on a replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent is set to be delayed.
In total, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is

KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait's public prosecution on Tuesday summoned several members of the Gulf state's ruling family on charges of attacking a private satellite TV channel, their lawyer said.
"They have received summons to appear for questioning on allegations they took part in the attack, causing damage to the offices and equipment and firing shots," Abdulmohsen al-Qattan told AFP. He said his clients have categorically denied the allegations and expected them to be questioned later