Abdullah said the Iraq conflict was the core problem for the United States in the Middle East, but "for the majority of us living in this part of the world, it has always been the Israeli-Palestinian, the Israeli-Arab problem."
"I fear that if we do not use the next couple of months to really ... push the process forward," there will be no momentum "to create a two-state solution ... Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and harmony," the king said.
If the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn't pushed forward now, he asked, "do we resign this whole region to another decade or two of violence which none of us can afford?"
As for Iraq, Abdullah said he was not privy to the discussion points, but Bush and Maliki need to take some strong action because "obviously ... things are beginning to spiral out-of-control."

'We are just at the start of what we think will be a downtrend for the dollar - a tipping-point has probably been reached,' said Tim Fox, currency strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, who expects sterling to hit $2 within the next three months.

The euro has been the main beneficiary. The European Central Bank is expected to continue raising interest rates into next year amid strong growth in the eurozone economies, while the Fed has left rates unchanged at 5.25 per cent since June.
'Steadily, the US dollar will decline through 2007, but probably at a faster pace in the second half of the year, as people realise the Fed is going to have to cut rates,' said Paul Mackel, currency strategist at HSBC.

Senators on Capitol Hill would like to see China allow its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate further against the dollar, making Chinese imports more expensive; but the chances are low.

"There is a historic opportunity for a Palestinian state within 1967 borders ... otherwise, there are chances of a wider confrontation."

Meshaal had been meeting Egyptian officials on the formation of a Palestinian unity government by Hamas and its rival, Fatah.

Chinese funds and expertise helped complete a nuclear power station in Pakistan's eastern province of Punjab in 1999. In April this year, the two countries said they would work together to build another such plant nearby.

There had been widespread speculation that the two countries might agree a nuclear deal similar to the one between the US and India. The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says Pakistan wants China to help it build more nuclear power reactors to meet growing energy demands, especially since the US has refused to provide Islamabad the kind of civil nuclear assistance it has promised India.

Pakistan and China have also agreed to co-produce an airborne early warning system. They already share other ventures in the defence field including the joint development of a fighter aircraft.

China has also ploughed millions of dollars into a project to build a massive shipping terminal in south-west Pakistan to gain access to the Arabian Sea. Our correspondent says Mr Hu's visit to Pakistan may have been intended to reassure his hosts over China's warming ties with Pakistan's regional rival, India.

Historically, China and Pakistan formed a bloc against India - but economic considerations are now more important than Cold War-era rivalries. Mr Hu's four-day visit to Pakistan was preceded by a landmark trip to the Indian capital Delhi, and financial centre Mumbai (Bombay) during which the two sides pledged to double trade to $40bn a year by 2010.

"This group represents a clear threat," Mr Meles said in Ethiopia's first prime minister's question time.

Some fear a regional war, as Ethiopia's rival Eritrea is seen as pro-Islamist.

The Union of Islamic Courts has denied claims by Ethiopia and the Somali government that it has links to al-Qaeda.

Some Islamist leaders want Somalia to take control of Somali-speaking areas of Ethiopia and Kenya.

US and British authorities have claimed that Syria is funding armed Sunni groups in Iraq, an accusation Syria refutes.

Syria has also been accused of allowing fighters to cross its border with Iraq and the US has claimed that Syrians make up the second-largest group of foreign fighters entering Iraq after Egyptians.

Syria says sealing the border is impossible and that Iraq must do more to patrol its side.

The US military said on Monday that between 70 and 100 foreign fighters cross the border each month.

The two governments agreed to restore full diplomatic ties and to reopen their embassies in Baghdad and Damascus and Zebari and Moallem signed an agreement in the presence of journalists.

In the document, Syria and Iraq agreed on the need for US-led forces to stay in Iraq until they were no longer needed, after which they would be gradually withdrawn.

Influential figures in Washington have urged the Bush administration to talk to both countries in hopes of gaining their help to bring the violence in Iraq under control. But many of President Bush's advisors oppose the idea.

White House policy has been to isolate Iran to compel the government to abandon its nuclear enrichment program and to refuse to talk with Syria until it drops its support for what the United States considers terrorist groups. As the debate continues in Washington, Iran has stepped forward. As the debate continues in Washington, Iran has stepped forward.

Syria has served as an entry point and refuge for Sunni Arab Muslim insurgents who have carried out a steady stream of attacks on U.S. forces and the fledgling Iraqi government since the American-led invasion in 2003.
Iran, a Shiite Muslim nation, has significant influence over the Shiite militias that have increasingly attacked Iraq's minority Sunnis.

Abaidi said Iraq's main factions, the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, had discussed Iran's plan and had agreed, in principle, that it was worthwhile.

Three-way talks could boost Iran's regional sway and could also put the Bush administration in the awkward position of having to acknowledge the influence of a nation it once called a member of the "axis of evil" and a sponsor of terrorism. But Nasr and Aaron contended that the initiative by Iran and Syria might also stem from broader national interests.

"All of the neighbours have a stake in this country not blowing apart or having a major civil war, because they will all get dragged into it," Aaron said.

Mr Hu arrived in the Indian capital, Delhi, on Monday evening. His four-day trip also includes a visit to the financial capital, Mumbai (Bombay).

"The purposes of my visit to India is to strengthen our friendship, increase our mutual trust, expand our co-operation and chart a course for the future," Mr Hu told reporters ahead of his talks with Mr Singh.

But rising trade between two of the world's fastest growing economies is encouraging vastly improved ties, our correspondent says. Trade between the two countries is expected to touch $20bn by next year. In the 1990s it was only about $250m.

Both India and China have produced staggering economic growth in recent years, but India continues to lag behind on many fronts, correspondents say.
China has a literacy rate of 95%, compared to India's 68%. India's exports of manufactured goods in the financial year ending this March was $71bn, compared to $713bn for China.

To emphasise the importance that the Roman Catholic Church in England attaches to the occasion, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, is accompanying the Archbishop of Canterbury on his visit to Rome and he will be present at many key meetings and services of prayer.

Although the two Churches have maintained a theological dialogue in recent decades, they remain deeply divided on some substantive issues which still separate them - the consecration of women as bishops is a prime example.

However Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Vatican's council for promoting Christian unity, who will play a prominent role in many of this week's meetings, has already warned the Church of England that the goal of "full communion" cannot be reached if they decide to follow the American Episcopal example and go ahead with plans to consecrate women as bishops. The first woman primate of a Church in the Anglican Communion, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schon, of the American Episcopal Church, took office in the United States earlier this month.

Pope Benedict will see the Archbishop of Canterbury only once during the Anglican leader's six-day visit.

The rest of the archbishop's timetable includes two public lectures, a joint prayer service in the Catholic Church of Saint Mary above Minerva (one of Rome's few Gothic-style churches, built over the ruins of a Roman temple), at which Cardinal Kasper will be one of the preachers, and a dinner hosted by Britain's ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell.

Pope Benedict leaves Rome next week for a five-day visit to Turkey.

His priorities at the moment lie more with his uneasy relationship with the Islamic world, and with the Orthodox, another important branch of Christendom, which split away from Rome nine centuries ago.

"Syria is determined to get all its occupied territories back to the 1967 border by all available means if Israel continued its refusal to withdraw by peaceful means," the official SANA news agency quoted Mekdad as saying during a meeting with the United Nations committee on Israeli practices in occupied Arab land.

The Syrian official said the continued Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon's Shebaa farms represents "the core of the problems in the region."

He further accused Israel of violating UN resolutions and demanded the international community "find means to respond appropriately."

Considered an extremist even by fellow mullahs, he was a fringe figure in Iran's theocracy until last year's election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fellow fundamentalist who views him as his ideological mentor. He is known to many Iranians as "Professor Crocodile" because of a notorious cartoon that depicted him weeping false tears over the jailing of a reformist journalist.

Mr Mesbah-Yazdi and his supporters will attempt to tighten the fundamentalists' political stranglehold next month, by standing in elections for the Assembly of Experts, an 86-strong group of theologians that would be responsible for nominating a replacement for Ayatollah Khamenei, whose health is rumoured to be ailing.

The so-called apparitions are taking place during meetings of the Cap-Verdi prayer group at St Paul's Catholic Church in the glitzy Cote d'Azur resort of Cannes. Believers say that Christ and the Virgin Mary have been appearing to them on a regular basis over the past six months.

Church-goer Rita Gomez, who helps run the prayer group, said: "The visions usually begin with the whole building trembling in the middle of a prayer meeting.
"Then various worshippers will fall off their seats shaking violently or being sick. When they come round a few minutes later, they say Christ or the Holy Virgin has appeared and spoken to them."

One 14-year-old girl had fits and began smashing windows, then began bleeding 'pinkish-yellow' blood, Miss Gomez said.
She added: "This might sound like the work of the devil rather than God, but everyone who experiences a vision says it was Jesus and Mary that appeared to them."

Clearly there is no appetite in any government for doing things the straightforward way - mandating clean energy, banning coal-fired electricity generation, clearing city centres of cars, forcing builders to adopt stringent energy efficiency standards. All this, we are told, will "damage competitiveness".

Yvo de Boer, the new executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, summed it up thus: "From looking at climate change policies as a cost factor for development, countries are starting to see them as opportunities to enhance economic growth in a sustainable way.

"The further development of carbon markets can help mobilise the necessary financial resources needed for a global response to climate change, and give us a future agreement that is focused on incentives to act."

Read these words in a positive way, and you visualise a mobilisation of business might to cool the Earth while making a profit - but turn the thought around, and what you have is the acknowledgment that making money, not reducing emissions, is the priority for governments and their advisers.

You certainly have an explanation for why the majority of the debates and conclusions here avoid any mention of reducing emissions.

At current rates, emissions will have risen by about 5% by the time they start talking.

Russian trade and economic minister, German Gref said the deal would allow Russia to compete "as an equal" in world markets. "This is a very significant event, which signals Russia's integration into the global trading system," he said.

"This is a historic step, the last step that signals the return of Russia to the market principles of the world economy." Russian president Vladimir Putin said the trade pact, which was essential for Moscow's admission to the WTO membership, would not have been possible without the political will of the US.

US trade representative Susan Schwab also welcomed the agreement. "The full integration of Russia into the global economy is in the interests of Russia and is also in the interests of the United States," she said.

The deal must be ratified in both countries and Russia must also agree a multilateral deal with the WTO as a whole - meaning it may be six months before its membership is complete.

Resistance

The US was the only member of the 149-nation WTO to withhold consent for Russia's membership.

Reservations about Russia's human rights record, state control over key energy resources, intellectual property rights and restrictions on the activity of foreign companies had all held up a deal. Russian resistance to sanctions against Iran in response to Tehran's nuclear ambitions also counted against it in US eyes.

Meanwhile, Russia has raised concerns about the sanitary conditions used in imports of meat from the US.

Much of the slowing is likely to be due to tightening measures, such as higher levels of bank reserves, as well as other restrictions recently added by the government aimed at reigning in corruption..

Meanwhile, China is facing complaints about its inability or unwillingness to control piracy, and counterfeiting, according to recent recommendations made by an advisory board to the U.S. Congress.

According to the latest report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission "U.S. customs officials have so far this year seized more than $150 million worth of pirated goods, most of it coming from China."

Carolyn Bartholomew, the Co-Chairman of the commission noted: '"Entire towns [in China] can depend on the revenue generated by counterfeiting," she said. "The Chinese government has failed to control such violations and typically prefers administrative fines, rather than the more effective avenue of criminal prosecutions."

With international banks having more access to the Chinese market, starting in December, as well as the potential for a global economic slowing into 2007, the big question is whether China can continue to grow its economy at double digit pace, independently of the rest of the world.