The UN chief has said Israel’s blockade of Gaza is causing “unacceptable suffering,” during a Middle East visit to reinvigorate the peace process.

Ban Ki-moon told Gazans that “we stand with you” as he visited an area damaged by Israel’s offensive 14 months ago.

His visit to the region comes amid tension over Israel’s plans to build more settlements in East Jerusalem.

Rebuilding is difficult due to a lack of building materials during the three-year blockade.

Israel imposed a tightened blockade after the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in June 2007.

Speaking in Gaza, Mr Ban said families were living under “unacceptable, unsustainable conditions”.

Mr Ban said it was “distressing” for him to see damage to housing remaining, with no reconstruction possible under the blockade.

The blockade has prevented the UN from completing housing projects, but Mr Ban pledged to continue providing aid to Gazans.

“My message to people of Gaza is this: the United Nations will stand with you through this ordeal,” he said.

‘Path of non-violence’

Among a list of criticisms of the blockade by Israel and Egypt, Mr Ban said the blockade was counter-productive as it prevented legitimate commerce and encouraged smuggling and extremism.

Mr Ban urged all Gazans to “choose the path of non-violence, Palestinian unity and international legitimacy”.

He also called for a prisoner exchange involving Palestinian prisoners and Israeli soldier Gilat Shilad who was captured by militants in 2006.

His two-day visit is aimed at restarting the peace process, and comes just ahead of a visit by US special representative George Mitchell on Sunday to try to get indirect talks going between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Ahead of Sunday’s Israeli cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said settlement building would continue.

“The policy of construction in Jerusalem is the same as in Tel Aviv.

“We will continue to build in Jerusalem as we have done for 42 years,” he said, according to AFP news agency.

Clashes

Mr Netanyahu is to travel to Washington on Sunday, where he is expected to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and possibly President Barack Obama.

Also on Sunday, the Israel army said soldiers shot dead two Palestinians who tried to stab a soldier at a checkpoint in the West Bank.

The soldier was on a routine patrol near a security crossing southeast of Nablus.

The deaths bring to four the number of Palestinians killed in the past two days in the occupied West Bank.

A Palestinian teenager was shot dead during clashes near Nablus on Saturday. A second person shot on Saturday died of his injuries on Sunday, West Bank medical officials said.

The army said no live bullets were fired, only tear gas and rubber bullets.

The Danish cartoonist against whom David Headley plotted an attack in retaliation for his sketches of Prophet Mohammed has said a long prison sentence would give time to the Pakistani-American LeT operative to “convert to more kind Islam”.

Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s 74-year-old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard says he does not believe in the death penalty and he would be satisfied with a long prison sentence for Headley, who has also pleaded guilty to involvement in the Mumbai attacks.

Westergaard has had three attempts on his life since sketching the cartoons in 2005.

“He (Headley) has to, of course, be put away for many years, but perhaps he can sit in jail, and he may think it all over and perhaps convert to, well, more kind Islam,” Westergaard told the ‘Chicago Sun-Times’.

In January, Westergaard was attacked by an axe-wielding “madman” who broke into his home and tried to kill him in retaliation for the cartoons. With his five-year-old granddaughter in a separate room, Westergaard locked himself into a steel-enforced “panic room”, put in place since he drew the cartoon.

“I could have tried to fight the intruder and I would have been slaughtered before the eyes of my 5-year-old grandchild,” he said.

Instead, he locked himself in the panic room and called for police. While he waited, he could hear the axe as the intruder tried to break through the door. The police came and shot the man, who is now in prison.

On March 18, Headley pleaded guilty to his role in the 26/11 attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans. (Read & Watch: No death sentence, extradition for Headley)

He also admitted to a plot to attack the Danish newspaper. (Read: Reports say Denmark got to quiz Headley)

The case is considered as one of the most significant terror investigations in the US, with Chicago’s top federal prosecutor US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald personally appearing in the court for the proceedings.

This is only the second case that Fitzgerald’s has personally prosecuted since he arrived in Chicago in 2001.

As the story goes, God spent six days creating the world and then rested on the seventh day. He told the Jewish people to always rest on the seventh day of each week, which was to become known as the Sabbath for them for eternity.

This was before Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerries and iPhones, of course. Adam and Eve didn’t have friends who would get upset if texts weren’t returned promptly, parents who wanted to know where their children were all the time or bosses who had complete access to their employees via work-issued devices. There is no excuse good enough to ignore the boss, even on a weekend.

But one group is trying to take back the Sabbath: Reboot — a nonprofit organization aimed at reinventing the traditions and rituals of Judaism for today’s secular Jews.

Composed of Internet entrepreneurs, creators of award-winning television shows, community organizers and nonprofit leaders, these “Rebooters” are people who typically have their cell phones glued to their palms. Several of them go so far as to say they have an addiction to their devices.

But this weekend they will be observing 24 hours of freedom from their devices: a National Day of Unplugging lasting from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

The day is being used as a launchpad for Reboot’s ongoing project, the Sabbath Manifesto. Dan Rollman, a Rebooter and founder of the Universal World Record Database Web site, created the Sabbath Manifesto because he felt that technology was taking over too much of his life.

“There’s clearly a social problem when we’re interacting more with digital interfaces than our fellow human beings,” Rollman said in an e-mail to CNN. “Rich, engaging conversations are harder to come by than they were a few years ago. Our attention spans are silently evaporating.”

The Sabbath Manifesto consists of 10 principles. However, people are encouraged to discuss online which principles work and which should be tweaked. As they stand now, the guiding principles are:

1. Avoid technology.

2. Connect with loved ones.

3. Nurture your health.

4. Get outside.

5. Avoid commerce.

6. Light candles.

7. Drink wine.

8. Eat bread.

9. Find silence.

10. Give back.

The National Day of Unplugging specifically promotes the first principle.

Even though Reboot is technically focused on reaching out to hyper-connected Jews, the values behind the Sabbath Manifesto are meant for all denominations, Rollman said.

“We believe that everyone can benefit from a respite from the relentless technology. Unplugging on a weekly basis won’t provide a magical solution to these issues, but it’s a start … a chance to catch our breaths, replenish our souls and reconnect with the living, breathing people we love.”

It may sound like a nice idea, but how realistic is the concept? Can people live without their beloved technology for 24 hours?

“No,” said Chris Maroudis, 22, without missing a beat. “The problem is, I live in Jersey and work here [Manhattan]. I have to contact my friends in Jersey to make plans. I’m not just going to go all the way there and then they’re not home.”

Some people are able to remember a simpler time before cell phones.

“This is new for me,” said 26-year-old Amanda Norman, laughing and waving her BlackBerry. “I remember even before cell phones, when you had to make plans with someone beforehand and meet them there. If you were late, you were late.”

Walking around Manhattan, though, it is hard to find people without a phone of any kind in their grasp.

As Nano Paulino, 27, pointed out, everyone in the city is working. The bosses need to stay in touch with you. Asked if he would answer a call from his boss at 10 at night, he said no. Why not? “I’m sleeping!”

His friend, Arnold Diaz, 30, would also have a hard time without his phone, but for a slightly different reason.

“Definitely not on a Friday night. We have to make plans. Maybe on a Monday or Tuesday,” he paused. “Not Monday, because if you meet a girl over the weekend, you want to call her on Monday. So maybe Tuesday or Wednesday.”

There is one piece of irony to the whole thing.

Lisa Keller, 42, said she can easily go a day without using her phone. Asked if her friends and family would get frustrated by not being able to call or e-mail her, she laughed. “I would first put up a Facebook status to say I’ll be off my phone and computer for 24 hours.”

Reboot also recognizes the irony that it has been promoting the National Day of Unplugging largely using social-networking sites. However, the group was asking people not to log on to their sites in the 24-hour window starting Friday evening at sundown.

John Kelly was 14 years old when, he says, he lost his faith in God.

“I was taken down these stairs. I only had a nightdress on. It was pulled over my head. I was left naked. This 6-foot, 4-inch [tall] religious brother stood on my hands… and another guy had a whip that we made ourselves, with coins in it. And he would run from a distance to flog me,” Kelly remembers.

Kelly, now 59, spent much of his childhood living in institutions run by Catholic orders in Ireland. The abuse he remembers most vividly took place at a reformatory in Daingean, in central Ireland.

“It was a very significant night for me,” he says. “I’d been raped and buggered previously by these religious brothers, and I’d been physically beaten and psychologically tortured for months — I spent two years in the place.”

But Kelly reached a breaking point as one Catholic brother held him down, another whipped him and two others looked on, he says.

“I begged God to take me away. I just wanted to die to get away from the pain. And God wasn’t there for me,” he says.

Kelly’s “crime” that night, he says, was to have been named by another boy at the reformatory, falsely, as an accomplice in a plot to escape.

But Kelly did manage to escape from Daingean soon after, and spent more than 30 years in London before returning to Ireland. Now he is campaigning on behalf of victims of child abuse.

Those victims number in the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — three major investigations in the past five years suggest.

The most recent, the Murphy Report, found the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Catholic Church authorities in Ireland covered up child abuse by priests from 1975 to 2004. Child sexual abuse was widespread then, the report found.

Liam McGlynn, a retired public official, thinks that it was no accident that so many child abusers found their way into the priesthood in Ireland.

The prevalence of the problem, he says, suggests that there were “people who were aware that the best place to abuse children was under the cover of the church. What better cover could you hope for?”

He emphasizes that that’s only his personal opinion, but he observes that an entire generation has been turned off by the scandal.

“Virtually no young people go to church. The main churchgoers would be my generation, still, and older,” says McGlynn, who is 57. “The church has lost an entire generation.”

“I haven’t been to church for quite some time. My faith has been seriously damaged,” he adds.

He’s part of a much broader trend, says Patsy McGarry, religious affairs correspondent for the Irish Times newspaper.

More than 90 percent of Irish people attended mass at least once a week in the 1970s. Today the figure is about half that, he says.

“The church has lost working-class urban Ireland,” he says.

The faithful were shocked and disgusted to learn that Irish bishops had covered up abuse in the name of protecting the church and its priests, he says.

For loyal Catholics, the most disappointing revelation, McGarry says, was “to have it exposed that bishops behaved in contravention of canon [church] law — as was the case — in contravention of civil law — as was the case — but also, and above all, in contravention of moral law. It blew them out of the water.”

He saw proof of the change in attitude towards the Catholic Church just this week, he says, when he went to a St. Patrick’s Day parade in his hometown in rural Ireland.

“There were two bishops, a retired one and his successor, and there was none of the deference [shown to them] that would have been there when I was growing up in that same small town. Deference to bishops has practically disappeared in Ireland,” he says.

That’s a very fundamental shift, he observes.

Once, bishops “had a unique status in Ireland, far higher than any government minister,” McGarry says.

“The bishop was a supreme being. … He had an unequaled and unchallenged status in Ireland,” he says.

“It’ll be quite some time” before the church regains its moral authority in Ireland, McGarry predicts. “I mean, this is a deeply damaged institution because its behavior has been exposed as immoral.”

But the church will survive in some form, he says.

“If you’re asking me, is this the end of Roman Catholicism in Ireland, it is not. What it is, is the end of a form of the Roman Catholic Church we’ve had in Ireland for about 150 years,” he says.

From now on, the church will need to involve more women and more lay people, as opposed to clergy, in running its affairs, both as a response to the crisis and as a simple matter of demographics, given that a generation has turned its back on the church, McGarry says.

Pope Benedict XVI is due to intervene in the crisis within days.

He is expected to release his official statement on the abuse scandal Saturday, in the form of a pastoral letter to the Irish faithful.

Abuse victim John Kelly says the statement will need to be far-reaching indeed to satisfy him.

“We need him to say that he will get rid of all bishops and cardinals who were involved in the cover-up of the abuse of children and start again,” he says.

“If it means all the bishops and cardinals have to go from Ireland, so be it,” he says. “Ireland would be a better place for it, and the church would certainly be a better place for it.”

Protesters in Thailand announced a full weekend of anti-government activities starting with a massive procession through Bangkok followed by “blood painting,” their latest shock tactic aimed at forcing new elections.

Thousands of Red Shirt protesters remained camped on Friday in the historic heart of the capital, which will be the starting point of Saturday’s march that will loop the capital and wind through Bangkok’s central business district.

“It will be a massive caravan,” said Jatuporn Prompan, a leader from the movement formally known as the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship. “Protesters will travel around Bangkok on thousands of vehicles.”

The protesters want Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to dissolve Parliament and call fresh elections — a demand he has repeatedly rejected. Abhisit has been sleeping and working from an army base for the past week to avoid demonstrators.

Protest leaders have increasingly portrayed the demonstrations that started on last Sunday as a struggle between Thailand’s impoverished, mainly rural masses and Bangkok-based elite impervious to their plight. The group largely consists of supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 military coup for alleged corruption, and pro-democracy activists who opposed the army takeover.

In an attempt to dramatize their demands, thousands of Red Shirts lined up on Tuesday to donate blood to their cause. Leaders claimed they collected 80 gallons (300,000 cubic centimeters) of blood that were transferred into dozens of large plastic jugs.

Most of the blood was splattered at Abhisit’s office, at the headquarters of his ruling party and at his private residence.

Protest leaders say they have 15 jugs of blood leftover and plan to use it to create a massive work of art.

“Artists and Red Shirts will be invited to partake in a blood painting,” Jatuporn said. They plan to unfurl a giant white cloth on which supporters will be invited to paint pictures, scrawl poems and express political statements.

“The theme of this artwork will be the history of the people’s fight for democracy,” Jatuporn said.

Thaksin is popular among the rural poor for his populist policies. They believe Abhisit came to power illegitimately with the connivance of the military and other parts of the traditional ruling class and that only new elections can restore integrity to Thai democracy.

Abhisit said on Thursday that the blood-spilling antics tested the limits of the law — and were testing his patience. He reiterated the government’s stance that the protests will be allowed to continue as long as they remain peaceful.

“Actions like drawing blood, pouring it and throwing — strictly speaking are not all legal,” Abhisit said, adding that protesters were also not allowed to block city streets and prevent government employees from entering their offices.

The size of the protest peaked on Sunday at some 100,000 demonstrators, but has decreased by about half since then.