US Vice-President Joe Biden says there must be no delay in resuming Mid-East peace talks, despite a row over Israeli plans for new homes in East Jerusalem.

Mr Biden repeated his criticism of the timing of the building decision, but praised the response of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the controversy.

He also stressed that the United States had “no better friend than Israel”.

The Palestinian Authority earlier said talks would be “very difficult” if the plans for the homes were not rescinded.

President Mahmoud Abbas informed Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa that he had “demanded that the Americans help us revoke this order” at a meeting with Mr Biden in Ramallah on Wednesday, chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told the BBC.

Earlier, Mr Moussa said the Palestinians had decided not to take part.

Both sides had only agreed on Monday to hold indirect, “proximity talks” in a bid to restart the peace process, which has been stalled for more than a year.

‘Willing partners’

In a speech at Tel Aviv University on Thursday, Mr Biden said the US had “no better friend in the community of nations than Israel” and that their relationship was “impervious to any shifts in either country, and in either country’s partisan politics”.

But, he added, the decision by the Jerusalem municipality to approve the 1,600 new housing units in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo had “undermined the trust required for productive negotiations” and warranted his unequivocal condemnation.

“Sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,” he told the audience.

However, the US vice-president said he also appreciated the response of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “who announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent this sort of occurrence, and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction would likely take several years”.

“That’s significant because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this as well as other obstacles,” Mr Biden said.

Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Mr Biden warned Israeli leaders that in President Mahmoud Abbas and his Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, they “finally have willing partners who share the goal of peace between two states”.

“Their commitment to peace is an opportunity that must be seized.”

He said Washington would continue to hold both sides accountable for any statements or actions that inflamed tensions and prejudiced the outcome of the indirect talks brokered by the US special envoy, George Mitchell.

“The most important thing is for these talks to go forward and go forward promptly and go forward in good faith,” he added. “We can’t delay because when progress is postponed, extremists exploit our differences.”

‘Crisis ended’

Mr Abbas has refused to resume direct negotiations with Israel for 17 months because of its refusal to put a complete stop to the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In November, Israel announced a 10-month suspension of new building in the West Bank, under heavy US pressure. But it considers areas within the Jerusalem municipality as its territory and thus not subject to the restrictions.

Tuesday’s announcement by the Israeli interior ministry that the Jerusalem authorities had approved the expansion of Ramat Shlomo overshadowed the visit by Mr Biden, the highest ranking Obama administration official yet to go to the region.

On Thursday morning, Mr Netanyahu telephoned the vice-president and “expressed his regret for the unfortunate timing” of the decision.

“Both agreed the crisis was behind them,” his office said.

Mr Netanyahu reiterated that he had not been aware of the announcement, and said he had summoned Interior Minister Eli Yishai to reprimand him.

The final approval process for the settlement would probably take more than a year, with construction starting several years from now, he said.

Mr Erekat dismissed Mr Netanyahu’s statement, saying it was “unacceptable because it talks about an error in timing and not the error in substance”.

“All decisions regarding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem should be cancelled,” he told AFP news agency.

A US court on Thursday again turned down the bail plea of terror suspect Tahawwur Rana, accused of plotting terror attacks in India at the behest of LeT, saying the Pakistani-Canadian is charged with “very serious crimes” which give him a motive to flee.

“Defendant Rana’s motion to revoke Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan’s detention order is denied,” read an order by Judge Harry Leinenweber of US District Court, Northern District of Illinois. Rana has made several pleas to be released on bond since his arrest last year contending that he was “duped” by American-Pakistani LeT operative David Coleman Headley.

Headley, 49, and Rana, 48, were arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in October last year and are accused of plotting terror attacks at the behest of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba against India and a Danish newspaper.

“The evidence in the form of recorded conversations, while not conclusive, appears to corroborate the Government’s contention that he was a knowing ally of Headley and had been acquainted in advance of the Mumbai attacks,” the court said.

In addition, the more serious charges if proved would undoubtedly lead to a higher sentence, the court said, adding that Rana has not “rebutted the presumptions”.

Rana has been indicted of “very serious crimes which is sufficient itself to trigger probable cause of his guilt which establishes the reputable presumption of a danger to the community”.

“Rana basically nitpicks at the evidence cited by theGovernment which ties him to the conspiracies in Mumbai and Denmark and fails to rebut the presumption created by the indictment in this case. The short of the matter is that the case against Rana is now much more serious than it stood when Magistrate Judge Nolan made her ruling,” the court said.

If convicted, Rana faces a maximum of life imprisonment. Rana has claimed that to a 48-year-old man, a  life sentence is no more serious than facing a 30-year jail.

“Nevertheless it certainly would not make him less likely to flee,” the court responded. Rana has been detained as result of a hearing before Judge Nolan, who had concluded last December that he presented a serious flight risk and the weight of evidence against him “strongly favours detention”.

Nolan had said the substantial period of incarceration Rana faces if convicted, his extensive foreign travel, expertise in immigration law, his ties to Pakistan and Canada and alleged contacts with a foreign terrorist organisation all give him enough reasons to escape from the country.

Rana’s family has offered a million dollar bond. His lawyer Patrick Blegen presented character witnesses in court who testified to his good reputation, “but acknowledged that they did not know if Rana had any dealings with a member of a terrorist organisation,” the court said.

Responding to court’s order, Blegen said he will not be able to comment on whether he would continue to seek bail for Rana, “as I have not yet spoken to my client” about the development.
Blegen also did not comment as  to when the  trial for Rana would begin.

A status hearing in the case has been set for March 29, when federal prosecutors will hold a partly private meeting to discuss the amount and type of classified information that may be used during Rana’s trial.

Chicago’s top federal prosecutor US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is handling the Headley-Rana case. Rana, who was born and raised in Pakistan, immigrated to Canada in 1997 and obtained Canadian citizenship in June, 2001. He and his wife, Samraz Akhtar Rana, live in Chicago with their two daughters and a son.

A Pakistani court on Wednesday directed police to produce the confessional statements of five American Muslims arrested for alleged terror links and accepted a request from the accused to hold their trial within a jail due to security reasons.

Ramy Zamzam, 22, Waqar Hussain Khan, 22, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, 20, Iman Hasan Yemer, 17 and Omar Farooq, 24, have been booked for planning terror attacks in Pakistan and for planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight US-led forces.

They were arrested from Sargodha in Punjab province in December last year.

An anti-terrorism court in Sargodha which is conducting the trial of the Americans today directed police to submit their confessional statement during the next hearing on March 17.

“The police challan (chargesheet) is incomplete,” the judge observed.

The judge further directed police to make arrangement for court proceedings in Sargodha jail after accepting a request from the Americans that their trial should be conducted in the prison for security reasons.

The accused are currently being held in Sargodha jail. The judge also directed prison authorities to allow the accused to meet their lawyers whenever they wished to do so

A Pennsylvania woman who called herself JihadJane was tied on Tuesday to an alleged assassination plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Muhammad atop the body of a dog.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors accused Colleen R LaRose, an American from the suburbs of Philadelphia, of linking up through the Internet with militants overseas and plotting to carry out a murder.

LaRose, 46, was arrested in Philadelphia in October, but her case was kept under seal. Although the indictment does not identify the target, a law enforcement official said her case was linked to the arrests Tuesday of seven Muslims in Ireland in connection with a scheme to kill the cartoonist, Lars Vilks. A group linked to Al-Qaida had put a $100,000 bounty on his head for the cartoon, which the group perceived as an insult to Islam.

European news reports said Irish police, who arrested the four men and three women in Cork and Waterford, had coordinated the operation with the United States. A Justice Department spokesman would not confirm whether LaRose had been involved with the Irish assassination plot.

Mark T Wilson and Rossman D Thompson, federal public defenders in Philadelphia who are representing LaRose, declined to comment.

She is one of just a handful of women charged in the United States with terrorism offenses in recent years. Michael L Levy, the US attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania, said in a statement the case illustrated how terrorists were looking for American recruits who could blend in. “It shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance,” he said.

LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The official said LaRose was born in Michigan and later lived in Texas and Montgomery County, Pa.

The indictment said that in mid-2008, LaRose, using the aliases JihadJane and Fatima LaRose, began posting on YouTube and other Internet sites messages about her desire to help Muslims. By early 2009, the court papers said, she was exchanging e-mail messages with unidentified co-conspirators in Southeast Asia and Europe and expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.

The indictment refers to e-mail messages in which a conspirator, citing how LaRose’s appearance and American passport would make it easier for her to operate undetected, allegedly directed her in March 2009 to go to Sweden to help carry out a murder. She agreed to do so, writing, “I will make this my goal till I achieve it or die trying,” the indictment says. She and another unnamed American later posted online solicitations for money for that project, the document said.

LaRose had attracted the government’s attention by then, the indictment said. She was questioned by FBI agents on July 17, 2009, and falsely told them that she had never solicited money online for terrorism, had never used the alias JihadJane and had never made postings on a terrorist Web site, the court papers say. She is also charged with making false statements.

Despite drawing the FBI’s attention, the indictment says LaRose traveled to Europe in August, joined an online community hosted by the intended Swedish victim in September and performed online searches to track him. She apparently never attempted to carry out the killing.

The indictment also says LaRose recruited other people on the Internet to wage or support jihadist attacks. It does not say whether any of them attempted to carry out an operation.

Three months after receiving the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, US President Barack Obama is yet to receive the $1.4 million cash award, the White House said on Wednesday.

“Not that I am aware of, no,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at his daily press briefing when asked if Obama has received the check of $1.4 million from the Norwegian Nobel Committee; which awarded him the coveted peace prize on December 10 last year.

Gibbs told curious reporters that Obama has not asked for the money yet. “I assume it (money) is with the committee,” he said.

Soon after receiving the award, the White House had said that Obama intends to donate this money to charities.

“That’s what we’re working on. That’s quite perceptive,” he said.

“There will be a process to evaluate that, from his perspective. I assume it will be many different charities. But he has not told me or anybody else here the specifics of what those might be,” Gibbs had told reporters on October 13.

On October 9, the Nobel Prize Committee had announced that Obama has won the Peace Prize for the year 2009 “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Humbled by the prize, Obama said in a statement which he read from the Rose Garden of the White House that he will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.