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Aide: Bush in Israel to ‘encourage’ peace talks

JERUSALEM (CNN) — President Bush arrived in Israel Wednesday to spur the fragile Mideast peace process and, a top aide said, to encourage Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to stay focused.

On his first visit to Israel as president, Bush was welcomed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Later, after meeting with Peres, Bush said he came away with high hopes.

The role of the United States will be to foster a vision of peace, Bush said. The role of the Israeli leadership and the Palestinian leadership is going to do the hard work necessary to define a vision.

Peres told Bush The process may be slow, but the progress can be sweet. Watch more on Bush’s arrival

National security adviser Stephen Hadley expressed concern to reporters aboard Air Force One about distractions to the peace process. The Palestinians are very concerned, obviously, about settlements; the Israelis are very concerned, obviously, about the rocket attacks coming out of Gaza. These issues need to be addressed, said Hadley.

Bush will encourage the parties to get after it, to stay focused, said Hadley.

The president will hear from the parties on where their negotiations and their discussions are, he said. And I think he will say some words that are encouraging to the process, but I don’t think you’re going to see him jumping into the middle of these negotiations.

Bush and Olmert were to take questions at a 5:55 p.m. (10:55 a.m. ET) news conference at the prime minister’s residence.

On Thursday, Bush is scheduled to travel to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Laying the diplomatic groundwork before Bush’s arrival, Olmert and Abbas met Tuesday in Jerusalem and agreed to have their negotiating teams conduct direct and ongoing negotiations on all final status/core issues, Olmert’s spokesman told CNN.

Just prior to his departure from Washington Tuesday, Bush said he hopes to get Israelis and Palestinians to agree on clear definitions of a future independent Palestinian state.

They need to have a vision that competes with the terrorists and the killers who murder the innocent people to stop the advance of democracy, Bush said.

The president said he also intends to work with Arab friends and allies on this very issue and remind them of the strategy and obligations they have to help this vision become a reality.

Security was tight for Bush’s visit to the region. Large parts of Jerusalem as well as much of the West Bank, including Ramallah, will be, in effect, shut down.

Over the weekend, American al Qaeda member Adam Yahiye Gadahn released a videotape calling on the militant group’s followers to receive [Bush] not with flowers or clapping but with bombs and booby-trapped vehicles. Watch Gadahn’s ominous warning

More than 10,000 police will be deployed across the region to back U.S. federal officers in what is the largest security operation in Israel since Pope John Paul II’s visit in March 2000.

Security will also be heavy at a number of large demonstrations in Israel planned to protest Bush’s visit.

To minimize his exposure, Bush will do most of his traveling by helicopter, but some stops on in his itinerary, particularly in the West Bank, are reachable only by car and on foot. That, security analysts say, will be the most dangerous time for the president.

During his tour of the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority will aid U.S. security teams in protecting the president.

Bush is scheduled to depart Jerusalem on Friday for Kuwait. He will then head to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He returns to Washington next Wednesday.

A major challenge for Bush will be keeping the trip focused on Israeli-Palestinian peace while other issues — Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and soaring oil prices — dominate the media headlines and serve as reminders of the region’s instability.

Bush hopes to have a peace deal before he leaves office in a year, and both Abbas and Olmert agreed to work toward such an agreement at the November 27 U.S.-sponsored peace summit in Annapolis, Maryland.

Subsequent meetings between the Israeli and Palestinian delegations have been overshadowed by disagreements over Israel’s plans to expand settlements in disputed areas of the West Bank.

The efforts to restart serious peace talks have also been overshadowed by ongoing rocket assaults from Hamas-controlled Gaza that have prompted a heavy Israeli military response.

On Wednesday, Palestinian militants fired three Qassam rockets into the Israeli city of Sderot, damaging a house. After an earlier mortar attack, Israel launched an air strike on a rocket-launching cell, killing one militant and wounding six others.
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Apple agrees EU iTunes price deal

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Apple Inc. will scrap online pricing policies across Europe for iTunes music downloads and soon charge consumers in Britain and the rest of Europe the same amount, the company and the European Union said Wednesday.

Apple charges about 9 cents more per song in Britain compared with prices in nations that use the euro. The company said it has to pay more to record companies in Britain for distribution rights.

The maker of the popular iPod media players had been under investigation since April by EU authorities after a British consumer group complained that Apple and major record companies were unfairly restricting choice and ramping up the cost of downloads.

The European Commission said it had closed an antitrust probe into Apple’s iTunes operation after finding no evidence that EU laws were broken. However, the EU said some copyright issues involving Apple remain.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes welcomed the agreement, saying it would allow consumers to benefit from a truly single market for music downloads across the 27-nation bloc.

Apple said it will lower prices for music on its British iTunes site within six months to match prices charged at 16 iTunes stores across Europe and reconsider ties with companies if they do not lower wholesale prices in the UK during that same period.

This is an important step toward a pan-European marketplace for music, said Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs in a statement.

EU regulators said Apple’s distribution agreements contained territorial restrictions which violate EU competition rules because consumers can only download music from the iTunes store in their country of residence. Music buyers must provide a credit card issued by a bank with an address in the country where they live.

Downloading a single in Britain costs 79 pence compared with 99 euro cents in Europe, a difference of about 9 cents allowing for currency conversion. The new price in Britain would be in line with prices paid in the United States.

The European Commission said it would not address other complaints over copyright restrictions which Apple says it is forced to abide with.

The EU executive office said there is no agreement between Apple and major record companies on how iTunes stores are organized in Europe, notably on allowing consumers to download music from an iTunes store outside their country of residence.

The commission said consumers should be allowed to make purchases from iTunes without restrictions. But it said it was aware that the licensing practices of some record companies and publishers make it difficult for iTunes to operate stores accessible for a European consumer anywhere in the EU.

Steve Jobs said Wednesday he would continue to try to convince record companies to lift restrictions so Apple can set up a single iTunes store for all of Europe.

We hope every major record label will take a pan-European view of pricing, Jobs said.

Online music downloads in Europe still lag behind the United States, pulling in just a fraction of revenues the record industry is losing from falling CD sales.

A report published this week by technology consultancy JupiterResearch said digital music spending last year was 401.2 million euros ($590 million), up 63 percent from 2006, but only 13 percent of lost CD sales throughout the year. E-mail to a friend

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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BA targeting trans-Atlantic market

LONDON, England (CNN) — British Airways has revealed it plans to enter the trans-Atlantic market battle by launching a subsidiary airline with daily flights from continental Europe.

The new airline will be called OpenSkies and will launch in June, flying between New York, Brussels and Paris, BA said on Wednesday.

It is BA’s first attempt at taking advantage of last year’s landmark Open Skies agreement and heading off expected competition from other airlines on lucrative trans-Atlantic routes.

Open Skies liberalized the trans-Atlantic travel market by allowing any airline — European or American — to fly any route between any city in Europe and any city in America.

United States and European Union transportation officials who agreed to the pact said it could ultimately provide more choice and cheaper tickets to passengers flying over the Atlantic.

Air France and Delta Air Lines have already announced a joint venture to share revenues and costs on their trans-Atlantic routes under Open Skies rules.

The pact also means the end of the stranglehold that carriers like BA and Virgin have had on trans-Atlantic flights from Heathrow and may allow other airlines to launch direct flights from the London airport.

BA said its new airline would use Boeing 757s, each one able to carry as many as 82 passengers in three onboard classes: business, premium economy, and economy. The business cabin will have 24 seats that convert into 6-foot flat beds.

The service will start this summer with one 757 and BA said it hoped to have six 757s operating by the end of 2009.

The aircraft, which will come from the current BA fleet, will also be retrofitted with winglets to improve fuel efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions and increase operating range.
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Analysis: Terror fight goes online

(CNN) — Several revealing security nuggets — some encouraging, some worrying — emerged when a London man pleaded guilty Tuesday to terror offences at the Old Bailey.

Sohail Qureshi admitted planning to fly to Pakistan to commit acts of terrorism. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport in October 2006 carrying thousands of pounds in cash plus night-sight equipment and medical supplies.

Entering the guilty plea meant he wasn’t required to answer questions in court about his precise intentions. But searches through his Internet communications turned up a desire to kill many in his operation.

Peter Clarke, the UK’s top counterterror police officer, said he believed that coalition forces, possibly in Afghanistan, were the most likely target.

The worrying security nugget was the revelation that Qureshi had been in communication, by e-mail and via extremist Web forums, with a woman by the name of Samina Malik.

Malik was found guilty two months ago of possessing documents likely to be of use for acts of terrorism. She liked to call herself the Lyrical Terrorist and wrote poetry urging the killing of non-believers and the raising of children to be holy fighters.

Malik worked air-side at Heathrow in a branch of the shop WH Smith and it emerged on Tuesday that she had passed on details of changes in security arrangements at the airport after a request to do so from Qureshi.

Investigators say that Internet communication records reveal that Malik was well aware of Qureshi’s extremist views. The fact that someone cleared to work at London’s busiest airport was passing on security information to someone about to commit a terrorist act must be a cause for concern.

More encouraging is the fact it’s clear that police are using Internet communications with considerable success as they track down the networks of would-be terrorists and their accomplices.

Malik’s arrest came after her details were found on Qureshi’s computer. Police also say that Qureshi was in contact with other extremists, which has presumably benefited other police investigations.

None of this comes as a surprise necessarily, but it does serve to underline the fact that the battle in cyberspace has more than one facet to it.

Yes, recruitment and radicalization is taking place on the Internet, but so is crime fighting.
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Iran: ‘U.S. faked conflict video’

(CNN) — Iran has denounced video and audio recording released by the United States of the two nations’ confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz as fabricated, according to statements carried by state-run television station.

The footage released by the U.S. Navy was compiled using file pictures and the audio has been fabricated, English-language channel Press TV reported an official in the Revolutionary Guards as saying Wednesday.

The Pentagon Tuesday released a four-minute, 20-second video of Sunday’s incident, including video showing small Iranian boats swarming around U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. In the audio recording, a man speaking in heavily accented English threatened, I am coming to you. …You will explode after … minutes.

U.S. President George W Bush called the confrontation a provocative act during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden Tuesday, just before departing for Israel and the West Bank. Watch the confrontation

It’s a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple, Bush said. I don’t know what their thinking was.

The U.S. had called the incident, between five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats and three U.S. Navy ships as a significant confrontation in which the U.S. boats had been harassed and provoked.

An Iranian official, however, said it was not a serious incident, the state-run news agency IRNA reported.

U.S. military officials said the confrontation, between five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats and three U.S. Navy, occurred early Sunday morning in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

The Pentagon said that as the guided missile destroyer USS Hopper, the guided missile cruiser USS Port Royal and the guided-missile frigate USS Ingraham were entering the Persian Gulf, five Iranian boats approached them at high speed and swarmed them.

The Iranian boats made threatening moves toward the U.S. ships and in one case came within 200 yards of one of them, the U.S. officials said.

The U.S. Navy also received a radio transmission that officials believe came from the Iranian boats. The transmission said: I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes, U.S. military officials told CNN.

When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they took up their gun positions and officers were in the process of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials added.

After the radio transmission, one of the Iranian boats dropped white boxes into the water in front of the U.S. ships, the officials said. It was not clear what was in the boxes, the officials said. No shots were fired, and no one was injured.

In November the U.S. military reported that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — which the United States considers to be a major supporter of terrorist activity — had taken command of Tehran’s naval operations in the Persian Gulf, one of the world’s key shipping regions and an area of high tension.

In March last year, Iran detained 15 crew members of a British ship before releasing them after nearly two weeks. Iran alleged the British vessel strayed into Iranian waters — an assertion Britain strongly denied. E-mail to a friend

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