Israel has rebuffed Obama's request for a complete freeze on settlement construction, while Arab states, whose own peace offer has gathered dust since 2002, have brushed off his calls for goodwill gestures toward the Jewish state. Sceptics point to a rightwing Israeli cabinet more focused on threats from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas than on making peace with Palestinians mired in rivalry between Islamist militants ruling the Gaza Strip and their Fatah foes in the West Bank.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her boss a status report on Thursday which appeared to confirm widespread doubts inside and outside the region that progress is possible. "THIS REPRESENTS A CLEAR FAILURE BY A PRESIDENT WHO TRIED TO BRING ABOUT CHANGE AND, A YEAR ON, ADMITS HE HAS FAILED," Yossi Beilin, an Israeli architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, told Israel's army radio on Friday. Washington still hopes to relaunch peace talks that stalled in December if it can forge a deal on their terms of reference

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, with evident distaste, bowed to US pressure to talk of negotiating the creation of a Palestinian state, BUT ONLY IF IT IS DEMILITARIZED AND IF PALESTINIANS RECOGNIZE ISRAEL AS A JEWISH STATE. Palestinians see this demand as prejudicing the claims to return or compensation of refugees displaced in the 1948 war over Israel's creation, and as undermining the status of Israeli Arabs who make up a fifth of its population.

The prime ministers of regional giants China and India also looked to foster unity on the sidelines of the summit in Thailand after months of trading barbs over long-standing territorial issues. Japan's new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said a proposed East Asian community involving all 16 countries should aspire to take a leading role as the region makes an early rebound from the global economic crisis.

"It would be meaningful for us to have the aspiration that East Asia is going to lead the world and with the various countries with different regimes cooperating with each other towards that perspective," Hatoyama, who took office last month, told the Bangkok Post newspaper. He described Japan's alliance with the United States as the cornerstone of its foreign policy, but said the region should "try to reduce as much as possible the gaps, the disparities that exist amongst the Asian countries".

China would "doubtless" grow further, particularly economically, "but I do not necessarily regard that as a threat," Hatoyama said. Officials said separately that East Asian nations would carry out a feasibility study for a huge free trade zone covering ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea and a larger group involving India, Australia and New Zealand.

The declaration that Obama signed late Friday means Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius to bypass federal rules when opening alternative care sites, such as offsite hospital centers at schools or community centers, if needed. Hospitals could modify patient rules — for example, requiring them to give less information during a hectic time — to quicken access to treatment, with government approval.

The declaration, which the White House announced Saturday, allows HHS in some cases to let hospitals relocate emergency rooms offsite to reduce flu-related burdens and to protect noninfected patients. Administration officials said the declaration was a pre-emptive move designed to make decisions easier when they need to be made. Officials said this was not in response to any single development on an outbreak that has lasted months and has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States.

The quake struck at a depth of 92 miles (148km), USGS reported. Indonesia issued but later withdrew a tsunami alert. Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the world's most active areas for earthquakes and volcanoes. IT HAS RECENTLY BEEN STRUCK BY STRING OF DEADLY EARTHQUAKES. In September, dozens were killed by a tremor off Java, while a quake which hit Sumatra left more than 1,000 people dead.

According the the USGS, Saturday's earthquake struck 138 miles (222km) from Saumlaki, in Indonesia's Tanimbar islands. Indonesian authorities reportedly put the quake's magnitude at 7.3.

"Those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers," Mr Soros said. "These are gifts, hidden gifts, from the government, so I don't think that those monies should be used to pay bonuses. THERE'S A RESENTMENT WHICH I THINK IS JUSTIFIED." Mr Soros, who joins a transatlantic chorus calling for limits on risk, leverage and compensation at big banks, said proprietary traders belong at hedge funds, not at banks, and that the compensation at Wall Street companies should be limited to prevent excessive risk.

"With the too-big-to-fail concept comes a need to regulate the payments that employees receive," said Mr Soros, who will elaborate on his views in lectures in Budapest next week. Some bankers have argued that limits on pay would make it difficult for them to retain their most talented risk-takers. Mr Soros agreed and said this would be a good thing.

"That would push the risk-takers who are good at taking risks out of Goldman Sachs into hedge funds, where they actually belong, BECAUSE HEDGE FUNDS TAKE RISKS WITH THEIR OWN CAPITAL, NOT WITH DEPOSITS AND NOT WITH GOVERNMENT GUARANTEES," he said.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was A DELIBERATE PLAN TO "OPEN UP THE UK TO MASS MIGRATION" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote". As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons. Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001. Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: "Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite. Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock up but also a conspiracy. They were right. THIS GOVERNMENT HAS ADMITTED THREE MILLION IMMIGRANTS FOR CYNICAL POLITICAL REASONS CONCEALED BY DODGY ECONOMIC CAMOUFLAGE."

WND has reported multiple times on the background of Jennings, who founded the "Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network," which promotes homosexuality in public schools across the nation. "The real story here is not the corruption of Harvard – that's old hat – the real story is THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES CHOOSING A MORALLY CHALLENGED ANTI-CATHOLIC HOMOSEXUAL TO JOIN HIS TEAM.

That Jennings belongs to, and sponsors, an urban terrorist organization, should alone disqualify him from public service at a municipal level. And remember, Obama did not choose him to monitor global cooling – HE WAS CHOSEN TO INSTRUCT YOUTH ON MORAL MATTERS," Donohue said. "Catholics deserve to know why Obama likes Jennings."

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Regional analysts say that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan seeks to re-establish Turkey's historical influence in the Turkic countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan by perpetuating a peacekeeping role where it either ruled or dominated for centuries.

As pointed out in the G2B's June 29 article titled, "Turkey losing interest in EU," Turkey's apparent foreign policy shift may be due in part to a new generation of advisers surrounding Erdogan. Turkey's new foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, for example, is one such influential adviser who has outlined what he calls a "multidimensional policy" contrary to what has been practiced.

Previous Turkish leadership has been more Western leaning, focusing entirely on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Europe and the United States.

Maimonides, the renowned Torah giant known as the Rambam, later wrote of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, "We left Acco for Jerusalem under perilous conditions. I entered into 'the great and holy house' [the Temple Mount] and prayed there on the sixth day of the month of Cheshvan." The Rambam further wrote that he visited the Machpelah Cave on the 9th of Cheshvan, and that he vowed to make both those dates "a special holiday [to mark the occasions] on which I will rejoice with prayer, food and drink."

The event is being held on the backdrop of the closure of the holy site to all Jews throughout the weeklong Sukkot holiday, when many had planned on visiting. The police explained that they had no choice but to close it because of the Arab riots in the area. Hundreds of Jews visited the site after the holiday.

The rabbis and public figures will also protest the "invasive and humiliating" police checks that leading rabbis have recently been forced to undergo when they wish to ascend to the Mount – checks to which non-religious Jews and other visitors are not subject. Organizer Yehuda Glick said, "We will declare with a loud and clear voice that CLOSING THE TEMPLE MOUNT TO JEWS BECAUSE OF ARAB VIOLENCE IS CLEARLY NOT ACCEPTABLE in a Jewish and democratic state."

The reasoning is that if we use greener biofuels in place of gasoline, it will significantly enhance our effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But the question is, ARE BIOFUELS REALLY GREEN? A pair of new studies in the October 22 issue of Science damningly demonstrate that the answer is no, at least not the way we currently create and use them.

In the first study, a team of researchers led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, projected the effects of a major biofuel expansion over the coming century and found that it could end up increasing global greenhouse-gas emissions instead of reducing them.

In the second paper, another team of researchers led by Tim Searchinger of Princeton University uncovered a potentially damaging flaw in the way carbon emissions from bioenergy are calculated under the Kyoto Protocol and in the carbon cap-and-trade bill currently being debated in Congress. If that error in calculation goes unfixed, a future increase in biofuel use could end up backfiring and derailing efforts to control global warming, according to the paper.

"Biofuels can be an important part of the portfolio of climate-change activities," says Steve Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund and a corresponding author on the second Science paper. "But we have to make sure we incentivize the right way, or we could end up with perverse outcomes."

Knowing they will face unyielding GOP attacks for voting to increase the eye-popping debt, Democrats are considering ATTACHING A DEBT INCREASE PROVISION TO A MUST-PASS BILL, possibly the Defense Department spending bill, according to Democratic and Republican sources.

Adding it to the defense bill would allow Democrats to argue that they voted for the measure to help troops in harm's way — and downplay that their vote also expanded the limit for how much money the country can borrow.

The strategy has not yet been finalized, aides and senators said. The House already approved a debt limit increase of $925 billion — above the $12.1 trillion ceiling Congress approved as part of the economic stimulus package last February — but Democrats may seek to increase the limit further so they don't have to revisit the politically treacherous issue until after the 2010 midterm elections.

The proposed rule now goes to the public for comment until January 14, after which the Federal Communications Commissions will review the feedback and possibly seek more comment. A final rule is not expected until the spring of next year.

"I am pleased that there is broad agreement inside the commission that we should move forward with a healthy and transparent process on an open Internet," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. The vote came despite a flurry of lobbying against the net neutrality rule by telecommunications service providers like AT&T Inc (T.N), Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Qwest Communications International Inc (Q.N), which say it would strip them of the ability to manage their networks effectively and would stifle innovation and competition.

Quarterly growth of 0.2% had been expected in the figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), although expectations had been tempered by recent figures showing no growth in retail sales in September, and a 2.5% decline in industrial output in August. The unexpected decline in the services sector was the key factor behind the drop, with the distribution, catering and hotels sector performing particularly badly.

The UK economy's reliance on the service sector, and financial services in particular, may be the reason why it is still in recession when partners such as France and Germany exited earlier in the year. The economy contracted 5.2% compared with the same period last year, which was marginally better than the record figure of 5.5% in the previous three months. It has now contracted 5.9% from its peak before the recession began.

The worse-than-expected GDP figures are likely TO MAKE THE BANK OF ENGLAND CONSIDER EXTENDING ITS POLICY OF QUANTITATIVE EASING.

"What we have is a bunch of dead banks that don't want to lend money," says Paul Miller, analyst with FBR Capital Markets. He points to the continued decline in net loans at Wells — $800 billion this quarter, down from $864 billion in December — as just the latest example.

"Everyone's patting themselves on the back for saving the banking system, but all we've done is postponed the day of reckoning. And so lending is declining across the board because banks know they are sitting on major capital holes."

In the real economy, THIS MEANS BANKS ARE EXTENDING LOANS TO BUSTED BORROWERS, PRETENDING THAT THEY WILL MAKE GOOD EVENTUALLY. And the government is supporting them wholeheartedly in their effort. The end result is a banking system that is making fewer new loans and pulling lines of credit in order to gird its collective balance sheet against the losses it knows are lurking. In the end, productive sectors of the economy — in particular small businesses — can't get credit.

The UN's World Food Programme says $285m (£173m) will be needed in the next six months. Some aid officials say the numbers of hungry could rise. Aid agency Oxfam has called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in the country. The report, named Band Aids and Beyond, called on international donors to adopt a new approach focused on preparing communities to prevent and deal with disasters before they strike.

"Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution," said Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director, who has just returned from Ethiopia. "IF COMMUNITIES HAVE IRRIGATION FOR CROPS, GRAIN STORES, AND WELLS TO HARVEST RAINS THEN THEY CAN SURVIVE DESPITE WHAT THE ELEMENTS THROW AT THEM." The drought, brought on by four years of bad harvests, has been made worse by conflict, climate change and population growth.