The Lede: Israel 'Cannot Go Back to the 1967 Lines,' Netanyahu Tells Obama

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

As my colleague Steven Lee Myers reports from Washington, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told President Obama on Friday that he shared his vision for a peace between Israelis and Palestinians and then promptly listed a series of nonnegotiable conditions that have kept the two sides at an impasse for years.”

Here is Associated Press video of the two men recounting some of their conversation for the White House press corps:

Before the meeting, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides told reporters that Mr. Obama failed to understand “the reality” of Israel’s situation and suggested that the American president was harboring some “delusions.” Speaking to the press as Mr. Obama sat by his side, Mr. Netanyahu echoed those sentiments, saying “a peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality.”

The Israeli prime minister then reiterated his strong objection to Mr. Obama’s statement, in his speech on Thursday, that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu said: “While Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines, because these lines are indefensible; because they don’t take into account certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the past 44 years.”

Israeli settlements, built on West Bank land Israel seized during the the 1967 war, are often referred to in Israel as “facts on the ground.”

Here is a look at the issue of settlements from Americans for Peace Now, a group that sees their existence as a stumbling block to a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

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Vatican Tells Bishops to Set Clear Strategy Against Abuse

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican told bishops worldwide on Monday to make fighting sexual abuse of minors by clerics a priority, telling them to create “clear and coordinated” procedures by next year and cooperate with law enforcement authorities when required.

The directives, detailed in a letter, are among the clearest to emerge from the Vatican since a sexual abuse scandal erupted in Europe last year. But the recommendations are not binding in church law and do not spell out any enforcement procedures or punishments for bishops who have been found to have violated church law.

The guidelines note that the sexual abuse of minors by clerics is not only an offense punishable by church law, but also “a crime prosecuted by civil law.”

Still, they play down the role of the civilian review boards that have investigated abuse in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere — and that have often faulted bishops for not stopping abuse — noting that those boards “cannot substitute” for bishops’ ultimate authority in adjudicating abuse cases.

The letter’s emphasis on the power of bishops did not go over well with some victims’ advocates, who have said that the bishops themselves have contributed to the problem by being more concerned with protecting priests than with protecting children.

“There’s no enforcement here,” the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a leading victims’ rights group in the United States, said in a statement. “There are no penalties for bishops who don’t come up with guidelines or who violate their own guidelines.”

“Until that happens — until top church officials who hide and enable abuse are severely disciplined — top church officials will continue to hide and enable abuse,” the group said.

The Vatican said the letter, signed by its chief doctrinal officer, Cardinal William J. Levada, was essentially aimed at making bishops around the world more responsive — especially in countries where they had not routinely tackled the problem of sexual abuse of minors or had even dismissed it.

“The aim of the document is to provide a common denominator for principles that everyone can bear in mind in making appropriate directives,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Monday.

Father Lombardi said the Vatican could not issue universal requirements for mandatory reporting to civil authorities because it also operated in countries with repressive governments. “Each reality is different, culturally and from the point of view of different countries’ laws,” he said.

The letter states that bishops are required to investigate all claims and send all cases deemed “credible” to the Vatican for review. It says that bishops should also listen to victims, create “safe environment” programs for minors and properly screen seminarians.

In March 2010, a sexual abuse scandal swept the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with scores of new victims coming forward. And new revelations have revealed weakness in even the toughest “zero tolerance” norms put in place by the United States bishops in 2002, which recommend removing a priest from ministry while claims against him are investigated.

In February, a grand jury in Philadelphia indicted a church official on charges of child endangerment in connection with the transfer of priests accused of sexually abusing children, and it also indicted four men, including two priests and a former priest, on charges of raping or assaulting children.

The grand jury also said it had found “substantial” evidence of abuse by 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the investigation, and the archbishop of Philadelphia subsequently suspended 21 of them from ministry.

A review board made up of lay people accused the archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, of failing to be “open and transparent” because the archdiocese screened the cases that the panel was allowed to examine.

In Ireland, a new report by civil authorities is expected this month, after two scathing government reports there in recent years showing extensive abuse and cover-ups by church officials.

The Vatican’s letter on Monday incorporated revisions made last year to the church’s procedures on prosecuting sexual abuse, including extending the use of fast-track procedures against priests and doubling the statute of limitations for disciplinary action against priests to 10 years from the victim’s 18th birthday.

It said that local bishops did not have to make their guidelines church law, as bishops in the United States have done, but could ask the Vatican for permission to do so.

Asked why it took the Vatican more than a year to issue guidelines that did not alter church law, Father Lombardi said the letter had to be vetted by multiple Vatican offices.

“Obviously, someone can say that at important and urgent moments it’s better to treat the issue quickly and swiftly, but if there are delicate and complex issues to consider, it’s good for there to be consensus,” he said.

 

Probing Link to Bin Laden, U.S. Tells Pakistan to Name Agents

The officials provided new details of a tense discussion between Pakistani officials and an American envoy who traveled to Pakistan on Monday, as well as the growing suspicion among United States intelligence and diplomatic officials that someone in Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden’s location, and helped shield him.

Obama administration officials have stopped short of accusing the Pakistani government — either privately or publicly — of complicity in the hiding of Bin Laden in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One senior administration official privately acknowledged that the administration sees its relationship with Pakistan as too crucial to risk a wholesale break, even if it turned out that past or present Pakistani intelligence officials did know about Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Still, this official and others expressed deep frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden. In particular, American officials have demanded information on what is known as the ISI’s S directorate, which has worked closely with militants since the days of the fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

“It’s hard to believe that Kayani and Pasha actually knew that Bin Laden was there,” a senior administration official said, referring to Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha. But, added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, “there are degrees of knowing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that someone close to Pasha knew.”

Already, Pakistani news outlets have been speculating that General Pasha, one of the most powerful figures in Pakistan, may step down as a consequence of the Bin Laden operation.

The increasing tensions between the United States and Pakistan — whose proximity to Afghanistan makes it almost a necessary ally in the American and allied war there — came as Al Qaeda itself acknowledged on Friday the death of its leader. The group did so while vowing revenge on the United States and its allies.

Pakistani investigators involved in piecing together Bin Laden’s life during the past nine years said this week that he had been living in Pakistan’s urban centers longer than previously believed.

Two Pakistani officials with knowledge of the continuing Pakistani investigation say that Bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, one of three wives now in Pakistani custody since the raid on Monday, told investigators that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed, Bin Laden had lived with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway.

In retrospect, one of the officials said, this means that Bin Laden left Pakistan’s rugged tribal region sometime in 2003 and had been living in northern urban regions since then. American and Pakistani officials had thought for years that ever since Bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora in Afghanistan, he had been hiding in the tribal regions straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

A former Pakistani official noted that Abbottabad, the site of the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point military academy, is crawling with security guards and military officials who established a secure cordon around the town, raising questions of how the officials could not know there was a suspicious compound in their midst.

“If he was there since 2005, that is too long a time for local police and intelligence not to know,” said Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani official now teaching at Columbia University.

Mr. Abbas said there was a tight net of security surrounding Abbottabad because Pakistani officials were concerned about terrorist attacks on sensitive military installations in the area.

Art Keller, a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who worked on the hunt for Bin Laden from a compound in the Waziristan region of Pakistan in 2006, said the Qaeda founder’s choice of the garrison town of Abbottabad as a refuge in 2005 raised serious questions. Bin Laden certainly knew of the concentration of military institutions, officers and retirees in the town — including some from the ISI’s S directorate, Mr. Keller said. And because the military has also been a target of militant attacks in recent years, the town has a higher level of security awareness, checkpoints and street surveillance than others.

If Bin Laden wanted to relocate in a populated area of Pakistan to avoid missiles fired from American drones, Mr. Keller said, he had many choices. So Mr. Keller questioned why Bin Laden would live in Abbottabad, unless he had some assurance of protection or patronage from military or intelligence officers. “At best, it was willful blindness on the part of the ISI,” Mr. Keller said. “Willful blindness is a survival mechanism in Pakistan.”

The trove of information taken by the commandos from the compound occupied by Bin Laden may answer some of these questions, and perhaps even solve the puzzle of where he has been in recent years.

A senior law enforcement official said Friday that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had rapidly assembled small armies of analysts, technical experts and translators to pore over about 100 thumb drives, DVDs and computer disks, along with 10 computer hard drives, 5 computers and assorted cellphones. Analysts are also sifting through piles of paper documents in the house, many of which are in Arabic and other languages that need to be translated.

In Washington and New York alone, several hundred analysts, technical experts and other specialists are working round the clock to review the trove of information. “It’s all hands on deck,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

Technical specialists are recovering phone numbers from several cellphones recovered at the compound. The experts need to distinguish foreign telephone contacts from any numbers in the United States, which undergo a separate legal review, the official said.

“We’re also looking through notes, letters, e-mails and other communications,” the official said. “We’re looking at who owns the e-mails and what linkages there are to those people.” The official said that the initial analysis would involve searching for information about specific threats or plots, or potential terrorists sent to the United States or Europe, and that the F.B.I. was pursuing a small number of leads from the information reviewed so far.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan. Eric Schmitt, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

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City Room: Bloomberg Tells Trump to Drop the ‘Birther’ Issue

 

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who once harbored presidential aspirations himself, had some advice on Sunday for another billionaire considering national office: Stay away from the “birther” issue.

Mr. Bloomberg, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” declared flatly that “the President was born here,’’ and suggested that Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon now exploring a presidential run, is not helping his prospective candidacy by affiliating with those who argue that President Obama was not born in the United States.

“The Republicans are making a terrible mistake in making this a big issue,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We have immigration, we have the deficit, we have the economy. Those are the things that the public cares about.”

Still, Mr. Bloomberg called Mr. Trump a friend and “New York icon,” and he said that “anybody can run for president.’’

Citing the wisdom of his longtime girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, an investment banker, Mr. Bloomberg said that what matters to the public are the issues of jobs and housing. “If the Republican Party doesn’t start addressing that,” he said, “they will lose and they deserve to.”

Making his first appearance on the Fox program, Mr. Bloomberg seemed to have a word of advice for everyone on Sunday. He said President Obama should spend more time wooing his political foes. “He has to pick up the phone and call and say, ‘I know we disagree on this, but I just want to say, I heard it was your wife’s birthday, or your kid just got into college.’ ”

He said Republicans and Democrats in Congress need to find common ground, and come up with a plan to reduce the nation’s debt. “We seem to be emphasizing our differences in this politically charged time, rather than focusing on what unites us,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg grew most passionate in discussing immigration, an issue he has emphasized as mayor. He said providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is essential to growing the economy. “You’re not going to solve the problem,” he said, “by yelling and screaming at those people.”

The mayor’s loquaciousness on all things national seemed to beg a familiar question: Does he see the White House in his future?

“I’m not running for president,” he said twice to Chris Wallace, the show’s host. “Is that explicit enough?”

Mr. Bloomberg told Mr. Wallace that, at a dinner in Brooklyn on Saturday night, somebody had told him he would make a great president.

“Thank you very much,” Mr. Bloomberg said he replied, “but I have a job.”

 

Labor Board Tells Boeing New Factory Breaks Law

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.

Boeing said it would “vigorously contest” the labor board’s complaint. “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent,” said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel. “Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.”

It is highly unusual for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of plant.

But ever since a Democratic majority took control of the five-member board after Mr. Obama’s election, the board has signaled that it would seek to adopt a more liberal, pro-union tilt after years of pro-employer decisions under President Bush.

Although the board has not yet issued many major decisions reversing Bush-era policies, it has begun requiring private sector employers to post a notice about workers’ right to unionize, and Mr. Solomon has begun moving more aggressively to win reinstatement of union supporters fired illegally by management during unionization drives.

In a statement Wednesday, Mr. Solomon said: “A worker’s right to strike is a fundamental right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. We also recognize the rights of employers to make business decisions based on their economic interests, but they must do so within the law.”

South Carolina’s two senators, both Republicans, Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, denounced the board’s move. “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign,” Mr. DeMint said.

The labor board said that in 2007, Boeing announced plans to create a second production line that would make three 787 Dreamliner planes a month in the Puget Sound area to address a growing backlog of orders. That was to be in addition to a line already making seven Dreamliners a month there. In October 2009, Boeing said it would locate its second line at a new, nonunion plant in South Carolina.

The N.L.R.B. asserted that on numerous occasions Boeing officials had communicated an unlawful motive for transferring the production line, including an interview with The Seattle Times in which a Boeing executive said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

Mr. Solomon brought the complaint after a union representing many of Boeing’s Washington workers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, complained that Boeing had decided to move production to South Carolina largely in retaliation for a 58-day strike in 2008.

“Boeing’s decision to build a 787 assembly line in South Carolina sent a message that Boeing workers would suffer financial harm for exercising their collective bargaining rights,” said the union’s vice president, Rich Michalski.

Mr. Solomon said that if he failed to settle the dispute, an administrative judge would begin hearing the case on June 14 in Seattle. Mr. Solomon said he was not seeking to close the South Carolina factory or prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there.

Boeing criticized the timing of the N.L.R.B.’s complaint, saying it came when construction of the factory in North Charleston, S.C., was nearly complete and after 1,000 employees had already been hired there.

Boeing said on Wednesday that none of the production jobs in South Carolina had come at the expense of jobs in Washington. It noted that its unionized employment in the Puget Sound area had increased by 2,000 since it announced its decision to expand in South Carolina.

The company also said it had decided to expand in South Carolina in part to protect business continuity and to reduce the damage to its finances and reputation from future work stoppages.