Bush seeks cooperation on new Iraq plan
WASHINGTON (Reuters):
President George W. Bush called on Democrats and Republicans yesterday to work together on a new strategy for the war in Iraq after a high-level group said the administration's current approach was not working.
"Now it is the responsibility of all of us in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, to come together and find greater consensus on the best way forward," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
Bush is under pressure for a shift in strategy in the unpopular war with sectarian violence rising and a growing number of Americans unhappy with his handling of the conflict.
As part of his review, Bush meets on Monday with senior officials at the State Department and then in the Oval Office with a number of outside experts on Iraq.
On Tuesday, he holds a videoconference with U.S. military commanders in Baghdad and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. He visits the Pentagon on Wednesday to talk to senior defense officials.
Bush is cool to recommendations from the Iraq Study Group that U.S. combat troops be withdrawn from Iraq by early 2008 and that the United States hold direct talks with Iran and Syria.
DNA tests confirm Diana's driver was drunk
LONDON, (Reuters):
French investigators say new evidence confirms Princess Diana's driver Henri Paul was drunk on the night she died, the BBC reported in a documentary to be broadcast on Sunday.
Although the official French inquiry blamed the 1997 crash on the chauffeur being drunk and driving too fast, conspiracy theorists have always questioned that verdict.
Mohamed al Fayed, father of Diana's companion Dodi, who was killed in the crash, has repeatedly said the pair were murdered because their relationship was embarrassing the royal household.
He and Paul's parents said the driver was sober when the car hit a pillar in a Paris underpass.
Two Palestinians hurt in Gaza Parliament shooting
GAZA, (Reuters):
Two Palestinian parliamentary guards were wounded when demonstrators and parliamentary security guards exchanged fire at the Palestinian Parliament building in Gaza City on Saturday, a lawmaker and medical staff said.
Some 1,400 uniformed police and other security officers demonstrating over the non payment of their salaries stormed into the parliament compound while some fired into the air as slogans were chanted from loudspeakers.
Hospital staff said the condition of the parliamentary guards, who were protecting lawmaker Ahmed Bahar of the governing Hamas Islamist group, was not serious.
"We view very gravely the attack against the Palestinian Legislative Council, whose aim is to create tension in Palestinian areas," Bahar said at a news conference.
A similar demonstration in the town of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, which attracted more than 3,000 participants, passed quietly,
Bosnia Serb PM urges war crimes suspects to surrender
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters):
The prime minister of Bosnia's Serb Republic called Saturday on all war crimes fugitives to surrender for the good of their compatriots.
"I call ... on the indictees to surrender and enable us to continue with a full democratic development of the Republika Srpska so that we are relieved of a burden that can always stop us in our progress," Milorad Dodik told a news conference.
International envoys in Brussels this week criticised Bosnia and particularly the Serb Republic for not doing enough to apprehend Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, fugitives from the Bosnian 1992-95 war.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic and Stojan Zupljanin are two of the six remaining fugitives from the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia who are sought by the U.N. war crimes tribunal and believed to be hiding in the region.
U.N. Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte last week said the two men were hiding in the border zone between the Serb Republic and Serbia.
"I am ready to personally head a unit tasked to arrest the persons indicted for war crimes, if I knew where they were," Dodik said.