Gaza, January 17
Israel plans to halt its Gaza offensive without any agreement with Hamas, a senior Israeli official said today. However, Hamas vowed to fight on. “The goal is to announce, subject to cabinet approval, a suspension of military activities because we believe our goals have been attained,” said the official, asking not to be named.

The security cabinet is due to meet soon and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will address the nation after that.

“There is no agreement with Hamas, and it is clear that if Hamas fires against Israeli soldiers or if rocket fire into Israel continues, Israel will reserve the right to act,” the official said.

A Hamas official in Beirut said earlier that the militants would fight on until Israel met their demands, mainly for an end to a crippling Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military kept up attacks on the enclave overnight and tank fire killed two small boys sheltering at a United Nations school, a UN official said.

“These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead,” John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told Reuters after the school was hit.

The Israeli army was checking the report.

Another Israeli official said he expected the cabinet to declare a unilateral ceasefire and reach an agreement with Egypt on increased security along the Gaza-Egyptian border.

Under that agreement, he said, the Rafah border crossing would open in line with a 2005 agreement with the Palestinian Authority, which calls for President Mahmoud Abbas’s forces to be in control and for Europeans to monitor traffic.

Gaza’s border crossings with Israel were likely to be open initially only for humanitarian supplies, with a more permanent solution linked to progress over negotiations on Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held in Gaza by Hamas, the official said.

Hamas negotiators were due to meet Egyptian officials in Cairo to discuss Israel’s response to truce terms offered by the the Islamist movement, which controls the Gaza Strip. “Either we hear what we have demanded or the result will be the continuation of confrontation on the ground,” Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, declared in Beirut.

Egypt has been trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as both sides refuse to deal directly with each other.

Hamas has offered a one-year, renewable truce on condition that all Israeli forces leave Gaza within a week and that all the border crossings with Israel and Egypt are opened. — Reuters

United Nations, January 17
The UN General Assembly called in a non-binding resolution for an immediate, durable ceasefire in Gaza, rejecting a more radical text proposed by a group of Muslim and Latin American states.

Although the resolution has no teeth, diplomats who supported it said the overwhelming majority in favour presented a cohesive moderate world viewpoint that would strengthen the Egyptian mediating efforts in the Gaza crisis.

The assembly’s electronic scoreboard showed 142 countries in favour, four opposed and eight abstaining. But the exact figures were not immediately clear as several countries said their votes had not registered due to electrical faults.

Voting against were Israel, the United States and the Pacific island of Nauru, which believed the resolution was biased against Israel. Venezuela, which thought it was too soft on the Jewish state, was also shown by the board as voting against although the country’s delegate said he abstained.

The assembly’s resolution followed closely the text of a Security Council resolution adopted last week. The council’s ceasefire call has not been heeded either by Israel, which attacked the Gaza Strip on December 27, to try to stamp out Palestinian rocket fire, or by Israel’s Hamas foes.

Like the council’s text, yesterday’s resolution calls for “an immediate and fully-respected ceasefire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.” The adopted text was hammered out in negotiations between the European Union and the Palestinian authority’s ambassador, Riyad Mansour, and was supported by moderate Arab states.

Mansour told the session that resolution would have split the assembly and made a “gift” to Israel.

The EU-Palestinian text included a phrase, opposed by the radicals that “the Palestinian and Israeli civilian populations must be protected and their suffering must end.” — Reuters

New York, January 17
The investigation into the crash landing of a US Airways airbus into the Hudson has been hampered by the loss of both of its engines in the river and the inability to reach the plane's black box, officials have said.

Investigators questioned the cabin crew yesterday and were to interview the pilot and co-pilot today, member of the National Transport Safety Board, Kitty Higgins told a press conference here.

"Both the engines are no longer attached to the plane," she said. Divers backed by sophisticated sonar "out there are now trying to locate the engines," she said. "I believe they started at the point where the plane came down and are moving down the river."

"If there was any kind of damage as a result of birds, my understanding is this will show up. It's a very important piece of the puzzle," she said.

The damaged plane is safely secured to a dock at the side of the Hudson, but is mostly submerged and filled with water.

"The black box and voice recorders are in the tail of the plane and still inaccessible because of fierce currents and cold," she said.

"We just can't get to them because of the problem of the currents, the water and the temperatures," she said. — AFP

Philadelphia, January 17
President-elect Barack Obama has called hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger to praise him for a “heroic” and “graceful” job in ditching his stricken airliner in the Hudson River with no loss of life.

Obama, who will be sworn in as president on Tuesday, spoke to Sullenberger for five minutes, a day after all 150 passengers and five crew on US Airways flight 1549 escaped alive and were able to step out of the plane into rescue boats.

“The President-elect told Captain Sullenberger how proud everyone was for the heroic and graceful job he had done in landing the damaged aircraft yesterday,” said Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs yesterday.

“The President-elect also thanked his crew and the many people on the scene in New York for ensuring the safety of everyone on board the plane.” — AFP

New York, January 17
Using a NASA radar flying aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists are getting their first look inside the moon’s coldest and darkest craters.

The Mini-SAR instrument, lightweight synthetic aperture radar, has passed its initial in-flight tests and sent back its first data, NASA said.

The images show the floors of permanently shadowed polar craters on the moon that aren’t visible from Earth. Scientists are using the instrument to map and search the insides of the craters for “water ice”.

“The only way to explore such areas is to use an orbital imaging radar such as Mini-SAR,” said Benjamin Bussey, deputy principal investigator for Mini-SAR, from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“This is an exciting first step for the team which has worked diligently for more than three years to get to this point,” he said.

The images, taken on November 17, 2008, cover part of the Haworth crater at the moon’s south pole and the western rim of the Seares crater, an impact feature near the North Pole.

Further data collection by Mini-SAR and analysis will help scientists to determine if buried ice deposits exist in the permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s poles.

“During the next few months we expect to have a fully calibrated and operational instrument collecting valuable science data at the moon,” said Jason Crusan, programme executive for the Mini-RF Program for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate in Washington.

Mini-SAR is one of the 11 instruments on the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Chandrayaan-1 and one of the two NASA-sponsored contributions to its international payload. — PTI

Washington, January 17
Returning the compliment to his predecessor who had called him “engaging” and “charismatic”, US President-elect Barack Obama said he always thought George W Bush was a “good guy” who had made the “best decisions” that he could at times under some “very difficult circumstances”.

At the same time, Obama maintained that the US had made a series of “bad choices” over the last several years.

Obama, who had frequently slammed the “failed policies” of the Bush regime on the campaign trail, told CNN yesterday that "he thought personally he (Bush) was a good man who loved his family and loved his country”. He praised Bush's team for helping with a smooth transition.

Obama said he thought Bush made “the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances”. “That does not detract from my assessment that over the last several years, we have made a series of bad choices and we are now going to be inheriting the consequences of a lot of those bad choices," he said.

In an interview on Fox News on January 12, Bush had said he "liked" his successor and praised him as "engaging". — PTI