BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS, Oct. 8--Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputy said on Monday that Israel should be prepared to enter future negotiations with the Palestinians over dividing Beit-ul-Moqaddas and ceding authority over some of its holiest sites.
Vice Premier Haim Ramon made the comments as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators opened talks at a secret location in Israel over a joint document they hope to present at a US-sponsored conference on Palestinian statehood, Reuters reported.
“Wouldn’t it be the right deal today for the Palestinians, the Western world and the international community to recognize (Israel’s) annexation of ... (Jewish) neighborhoods as part of Beit-ul-Moqaddas, and for us to quit the Arab neighborhoods,“ Ramon told Israel Radio.
He said talk of ceding control over holy sites in Beit-ul-Moqaddas’s Old City, which he referred to as the “holy basin,“ were premature for now.
But Ramon added: “We need to say there will be a special regime in the ’holy basin’, which we will talk about in the future.“
Ramon’s public comments on one of the most sensitive issues in the conflict have raised speculation that he is floating trial balloons on behalf of Olmert.
Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed last week the joint document would serve as the basis for final-status negotiations that would begin after the conference, expected in mid-to-late November in Annapolis, Maryland.
Final status talks--over the borders of a future Palestinian state and the fate of Beit-ul-Moqaddas and millions of Palestinian refugees--broke down in early 2001 amid a surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Abbas wants to bring any final-status agreement before the Palestinian people for a referendum, but it is unclear how that would be accomplished with the Palestinian territories divided between Hamas Islamists ruling the Gaza Strip and his secular Fatah faction controlling the occupied West Bank.
Ramon is one of Olmert’s closest confidants, but the prime minister, weakened politically by corruption scandals and last year’s war in Lebanon, has not committed publicly to backing his deputy’s proposals.

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Oct. 8--Sudan will host hundreds of Palestinian refugees who have been stranded for months in terrible conditions on Iraq’s border with Syria and Jordan, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
“It’s a few hundred. The president (Omar Hassan Al-Bashir) agreed to the request of both Hamas and Fatah to accommodate them and we are going to inform the Arab League and then make our preparations,“ said a senior Foreign Ministry official, who declined to be named, Reuters reported.
Iraq had 30,000 registered Palestinian refugees before the US-led invasion in 2003. The community became the target of attacks partly because of the Baghdad government’s support for the Palestinians under Saddam Hussein’s rule.
An estimated 15,000 Palestinians remain in Baghdad where they are vulnerable to murder, kidnapping and threats, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).
Some 1,550 Palestinians have been trapped in al Waleed and al Tanf refugee camps on the Iraqi side of the Syrian border for months, UNHCR has said.
Conditions in the camps, where temperatures can reach 50 degrees Celsius in the Iraqi desert (122 degrees Fahrenheit), are poor.
Syria stopped taking in Palestinian refugees after accepting 250 in 2006, though Damascus allowed four seriously ill refugees to enter for treatment in August.
Sudan itself has hundreds of thousands of refugees in neighboring countries and a huge diaspora because of decades of multiple civil wars.

Students walk with flags with the face of Argentine born guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara in Havana, Oct. 7.

HAVANA, Oct. 8--For decades a global symbol of rebellion, Ernesto ’Che’ Guevara is to be honored Monday with ceremonies in Cuba, where his myth was forged, and Bolivia, where he was executed 40 years ago spreading the gospel of Marxist revolution.
The main ceremony in Cuba will begin at 8:00 am (1200 GMT) in Santa Clara, a town 300 kilometers east of Havana, where the Argentine-born doctor-turned-guerrilla leader fought a battle during the Cuban revolution in 1958 and his remains are buried, AFP said.
The ceremony will be headed by “a leader of the revolution,“ the daily Juventud Rebelde reported Sunday, without specifying if it will be convalescing leader Fidel Castro, 81, or his brother Raul, the country’s interim president since Fidel underwent stomach surgery in July 2006.
Guevara met the Castro brothers in Mexico in 1955, and quickly joined their uprising against then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. By the time the revolution triumphed in January 1959 Guevara was a key player.
In Bolivia, President Evo Morales, a fervent admirer of both Che and Fidel Castro, will lead a ceremony in the southeastern town of Vallegrande, where Guevara’s bones were found in a mass grave in 1997.
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez will hold a ceremony at Pico del Aguila, in western Venezuela, which Guevara visited 55 years ago.

MUJHOI, Pakistan, Oct. 8--One of three helicopters escorting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf crashed in Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir on Monday, killing four people on board, but the president was unhurt, officials said.
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad blamed a “technical fault“ for the crash of the military helicopter and said Musharraf had already reached his destination when the accident occurred, AP said.
The crash revives concern about the safety of the US-allied general who has survived several assassination attempts. It happened two days after he secured a provisional victory in a controversial presidential election.
Musharraf traveled to Kashmir on Monday to commemorate the second anniversary of the Oct. 8, 2005, earthquake that killed nearly 80,000 people. The helicopter crashed in Mujhoi, about 12 miles south of Muzaffarabad, the main town in Pakistan’s portion of the disputed Himalayan territory.
The president’s spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, was among at least five injured passengers. He suffered a burned right hand but was in stable condition, officials said.
Arshad said the dead included an army brigadier, two soldiers and a cameraman for Pakistan Television. Two pilots and a technician escaped unhurt, he said.
PTV later aired footage of Musharraf touring the quake zone Monday.
In Mujhoi, hundreds of residents and scores of soldiers swarmed around the still-smoldering helicopter wreckage, 100 yards from the Jhelum River.

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 8--Sixteen militants fighting under a wanted Uzbek warlord with a $200,000 bounty on his head were killed in airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan, an official said Monday.
US forces early Sunday called in the strikes against fighters of Tahir Yuldash, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and an Al-Qaeda operational commander, said Nabi Jan Mullahkhail, the provincial police chief of Paktika province, AP said.
The US military late last month released a list of 12 Most Wanted militants in Afghanistan, and Yuldash was one of five listed with the top reward of $200,000.
Mullahkhail said one enemy fighter--an Uzbek--was captured during the fighting in the Sorobi district of Paktika and said that the militants from Uzbekistan and Chechnya were fighting under Yuldash.
In nearby Paktia province, US-led coalition forces and Afghan soldiers detained four suspected militants in Gardez district, the coalition said. On Sunday, officials said a bombing and a gunbattle killed four police officers and four militants.
Two officers were killed and two others were wounded when a bomb exploded under their car in Yaqoubi district in Khost province on Saturday, police chief Wazir Pacha said.
Also in eastern Afghanistan, a Taliban ambush in Nuristan province left two other officers dead, police officer Mohammad Daud said. Four militants were also killed in the Saturday clash, which occurred in the remote Kamdesh district.
Elsewhere in the east, two Afghan civilians were killed in Kunar province after speeding toward a checkpoint without stopping, NATO said.

Viktor Yushchenko

KIEV, Ukraine, Oct. 8--Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was to meet Monday with the leaders of four of five political parties that won seats in recent parliamentary elections for talks on forming a broad coalition between pro-Western and Russia-leaning forces.
Talks will cover “putting into action agreements on forming a parliamentary coalition,“ Yushchenko’s office said in a statement, AFP reported.
The ex-Soviet republic’s pro-Western president said immediately after September 30 snap legislative elections that he favored a coalition government including his Moscow-backed adversaries.
For Monday’s talks Yushchenko invited leaders of his Our Ukraine party and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko’s party, as well as the Regions Party headed by longtime rival Viktor Yanukovych, and the independent Lytvyn party.
The Communist Party was the fifth to win places in the 450-seat Rada, but was not invited to Monday’s talks.
Our Ukraine and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, which together led the 2004 Orange Revolution, have enough seats to form a slim majority in parliament, but they face a challenge from Regions Party, which is the biggest single force in the Rada.
Tymoshenko has already said she would refuse to join Yanukovych in any coalition.

KATMANDU, Nepal, Oct. 8--With 13,000 dead during more than a decade of fighting, there’s at least one good thing people here say about their country--at least there’s no war now.
But nearly a year after Maoist militants left their Himalayan bases to join the political mainstream, raising hopes the government could finally govern, the country’s politics remain deadlocked by feuding parties and overshadowed by the former insurgents, AP reported.
And in Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, where most rural people struggle by in a semi-feudal existence, pessimism has become the rule.
“I was naive enough to believe that things would change,“ said former Finance Minister Devendra Raj Pandey. “I thought the parties would change, and that the Maoists would come around to accepting this new political reality.“
Instead, “They have all thoroughly disappointed the people in every sense of the word.“
When the peace agreement was signed in November, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala hailed it by saying “Nepal has entered a new era.“ Prachanda, the Maoist leader who goes by a single name, said in his speech that: “We will now turn to a campaign of peace and building a new Nepal.“
But little has been built so far.
The Maoists came into the government promising to concentrate on such issues as land reform and education.
Instead, they face accusations of everything from forcefully recruiting new soldiers to intimidating political rivals and destroying voter education materials.
On Friday came one more disappointment, when, after days of arguing, the political parties and the Maoists agreed to postpone elections to the Constituent Assembly which will draft the new constitution and map out the country’s political future.
The election was originally scheduled for Nov. 22, but few expect it to be held before March.
That decision will presumably require many more meetings in the prime minister’s walled compound, where politicians disappear behind a rolling metal gate and carloads of young Maoists, dressed in gray polyester safari suits, wait grimly in the parking lot for their leaders.