Obama Endorses 1967 Borders for Israel

?At a time when the people of the Middle East and North Africa are casting off the burdens of the past, the drive for a lasting peace that ends the conflict and resolves all claims is more urgent that ever,? he said.

Although Mr. Obama said that ?the core issues? dividing Israelis and Palestinians remained to be negotiated, including the searing questions of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, he spoke with striking frustration that efforts to support an agreement had so far failed. ?The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome,? he said.

The outline for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement came in what the president called ?a moment of opportunity? after six months of political upheaval that has at times left the administration scrambling to keep up. The speech was an attempt to articulate a cohesive American policy to an Arab Spring that took a dark turn as the euphoria of popular revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt gave way to violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Syria, a civil war in Libya and political stalemate in Yemen.

It required a delicate balance, reaffirming support for democratic aspirations in a region where America?s strategic interests have routinely trumped its values. While Mr. Obama pushed for Hosni Mubarak?s exit in Egypt, he has backed up the Bahraini royal family?s effort to cling to power. While he called for the resignation of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and supported a bombing campaign against Libya with that ultimate goal, he vacillated as Bashar al-Assad of Syria turned tanks and troops on his people, authorizing sanctions against him only on Wednesday.

Mr. Obama said the events in the region reflected an inexorable desire for democracy that nations ? both friend and foe of the United States ? could not suppress. He bluntly warned Mr. Assad that Syria would face increasing isolation if he did not respond to those demanding a transition to democracy. ?President Assad now has a choice,? Mr. Obama said. ?He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.?

He was no less blunt in the case of Bahrain, a close ally that has brutally crackdown on protests there. ?The only was forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can?t have real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.?

Mr. Obama, in his remarks, reaffirmed that the Middle East is a complex place, where different countries demand different responses, though. It was a marked contrast to his landmark speech in Cairo in June 2009, when he addressed himself to the Islamic world as a whole, trying to heal a rift with the United States.

He conceded bluntly that the United States had not been a central actor in the uprisings, but he sought to cast America?s role in the Middle East in a new context now that the war in Iraq is winding down and Osama bin Laden has been killed, in part, a primary goal of the war that began in Afghanistan nearly a decade ago.

Mr. Obama?s aides and speechwriters labored on his remarks until the last hours before he delivered it in the stately Benjamin Franklin Dining Room on the eighth floor of the State Department.

Until the end, for example, his aides debated how Mr. Obama would address the conflict that has fueled Arab anger for decades: the division between Israelis and Palestinians. A senior administration official said that Mr. Obama?s advisers remained deeply divided over whether he should formally endorse Israel?s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state.

That he did so sent a strong signal that the United States expected Israel ? as well as the Palestinians ? to make concessions to restart peace talks that have been stalled since September.

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Bracing for the Data Deluge

From Facebook to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the world is catalogued in databases. No one knows it better than MIT adjunct professor and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who has spent the last 25 years developing the technology that made it so. He got his big break by inventing and commercializing technology that underlies most of the databases, known as relational databases, that rule today. But Stonebraker now happily calls his earlier inventions largely obsolete. He's working on a new generation of database technology that can handle the flood of digital data that is starting to overwhelm established methods.

"Relational databases are omnipresent as the solution for enterprise data. They have been fabulously successful," Stonebraker says. But he says that the largest database vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, still sell such products as being appropriate for any business. Stonebraker has a different view: that new database technologies are required to handle the exponential increases in the information that businesses must handle. Stonebraker, 67, is already finding success with several of his own new approaches.

One is a database system called C-Store. Unlike most systems in use today, it stores data on disk column by column, not row by row. That simple tweak required a complete rewrite of how databases have worked, but it dovetails neatly with both the way computer memory works and the way databases are accessed. That yields much faster performance and more compressed data.

That tweak and others made by Stonebraker and colleagues at MIT, Brown, Brandeis, Yale, and the University of Massachusetts enabled the launch of Vertica, a company that commercialized C-Store and helped customers to query large databases almost in real time. Vertica was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in February and boasts clients including Comcast, which uses it to monitor the millions of devices that make up its TV and Internet networks, and Groupon, which uses it to analyze the actions of its millions of subscribers.

A related system from Stonebraker and some of the same academic colleagues, H-Store, builds on the same ideas with extra improvements such as running entirely in a computer's memory, not on disk; this method is particularly useful in online transaction processing. H-Store's code is open source, but the technology is being commercialized by venture-backed VoltDB, with Stonebraker as CTO. He argues that this kind of use-specific, built-for-speed databasing system is what most enterprises will need to adopt sooner rather than later to deal with the flood of digital data.

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Blog - Earthquakes, Networks And the Tricky Topic of Quake Prediction

One of the goals of earthquake research is to provide warnings that can mitigate the effects of a disaster. At present, these attempts are limited to long range warnings which estimate the risk of significant damage over a period of years or decades, and to very short range warnings, on the order of a few seconds.

But high quality warnings that a quake is imminent in the next few days or weeks--a period that might allow large-scale evacuation--still elude earthquake scientists.

It may be that these kinds of warnings are not possible in principle. But that hasn't stopped scientists looking. The study of earthquakes reveals all kinds of hidden patterns in the way they occur. Much of this work has compared the properties of specific earthquakes themselves, things like their magnitude and the time between successive quakes.

This has been rewarding, revealing all kinds of power laws governing things like the number of events of a specific magnitude and the difference between the main shock and its biggest aftershock.

But none of these patterns has yet turned out to be particularly useful for predictions on the scale of days or weeks. Perhaps, say the optimists, all that's needed is a new way of thinking about earthquakes.

Today, Gene Stanley and pals at Boston University present just such a new approach. Instead of studying the properties of individual earthquakes, these guys have compared the patterns of quakes at different locations in Japan. They then create a network in which they link locations with similar patterns (see picture above).

That could turn out to be a powerful approach. One reason why earthquake science is so complex is that future quakes depend crucially on the history of quakes in that location.

To understand why, a good analogy is with forest fires, which also follow a power law in their size distribution. It's obvious that the size of a forest fire does not depend on the size of the match that starts it. Instead, the way the fire spreads is determined largely by the network of connections between the trees. If there is no connection, the fire cannot spread.

So the size of a forest fire depends crucially on the history of tree growth (something that could be measured in principle but not in practice).

Many seismologists believe a similar process explains the size distribution of earthquakes. An earthquake becomes large if, at the moment it begins, the network of faults allows it to spread. So the size of an earthquake depends on the history of the fault network.

But while this network approach has revolutionised ideas about how earthquakes occur, it has done little for earthquake prediction on the scale of days.

Of course, seismologists have long studied whether regions with similar pasts will have similar futures. In the language of physics, these guys want to know whether the time series of events in the past is a predictor of the times series in the future.

The answer is a qualified yes. If you live in a region that has experienced big earthquakes in the past then it's good bet you'll get them in the future. However, the data does not allow predictions on the scale we're interested in here.

What Stanley and co have done is to apply a network approach to the study of these time series. So they've identified regions in Japan with similar earthquake histories and then mapped out how these areas are linked to each other geographically.

The result is a network that reflects the geographical structure of the fault zone it describes. That's never been done before using network science.

The question it raises, of course, is whether a network approach to earthquake histories will be any more predictive than the traditional analysis of time series.

Stanley and co raise the idea of improving earthquake prediction early in their paper but they studiously avoid discussing the impact their approach may have on earthquake forecasts.

It's an omission that speaks volumes. But this approach may still help clarify and reveal other secrets of earthquake science.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1105.3415: Earthquake Networks Based On Similar Activity Patterns

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US: if you hack us, we may use military action

The US this week revealed its "International Strategy for Cyberspace" with the subtitle of "Prosperity, Security, and Openness in a Networked World" (via Ars Technica). The 30-page PDF document praises cyberspace and generally says nothing too exciting. It does, however, mention how the US government could respond to cyber-attacks, especially if someone were to pull off a serious cyberspace hack against the US, its allies, its partners, or in a way to threaten its interests.

In fact, the document says that military force is now an option. It's thus possible that the US will one day start a war in response to corporate or governmental computer systems being breached. If that sounds scary to you, that's because it is, especially if a hack isn't attributed to the correct party. Here's a relevant excerpt:

When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country. All states possess an inherent right to self-defense, and we recognize that certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners.

That being said, this is a last resort, and other policies will be attempted before such an attack is even considered. These alternative means include diplomatic, informational, and economic. The US makes three more related declarations: it will exhaust all options before military force whenever it can, it will carefully weigh the costs and risks of action against the costs of inaction, and it will act in a way that reflects its values and strengthens the country's legitimacy, seeking broad international support whenever possible.

It's also worth noting that the US is focusing on dissuading hackers from their motives. In other words, the cyberspace security strategy is more based on defense rather than offense. That's great to hear, because in this case we don't think the best defense is a good offense.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/43863-us-if-you-hack-us-we-may-use-military-action.html

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Bracing for the Data Deluge

From Facebook to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the world is catalogued in databases. No one knows it better than MIT adjunct professor and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who has spent the last 25 years developing the technology that made it so. He got his big break by inventing and commercializing technology that underlies most of the databases, known as relational databases, that rule today. But Stonebraker now happily calls his earlier inventions largely obsolete. He's working on a new generation of database technology that can handle the flood of digital data that is starting to overwhelm established methods.

"Relational databases are omnipresent as the solution for enterprise data. They have been fabulously successful," Stonebraker says. But he says that the largest database vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, still sell such products as being appropriate for any business. Stonebraker has a different view: that new database technologies are required to handle the exponential increases in the information that businesses must handle. Stonebraker, 67, is already finding success with several of his own new approaches.

One is a database system called C-Store. Unlike most systems in use today, it stores data on disk column by column, not row by row. That simple tweak required a complete rewrite of how databases have worked, but it dovetails neatly with both the way computer memory works and the way databases are accessed. That yields much faster performance and more compressed data.

That tweak and others made by Stonebraker and colleagues at MIT, Brown, Brandeis, Yale, and the University of Massachusetts enabled the launch of Vertica, a company that commercialized C-Store and helped customers to query large databases almost in real time. Vertica was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in February and boasts clients including Comcast, which uses it to monitor the millions of devices that make up its TV and Internet networks, and Groupon, which uses it to analyze the actions of its millions of subscribers.

A related system from Stonebraker and some of the same academic colleagues, H-Store, builds on the same ideas with extra improvements such as running entirely in a computer's memory, not on disk; this method is particularly useful in online transaction processing. H-Store's code is open source, but the technology is being commercialized by venture-backed VoltDB, with Stonebraker as CTO. He argues that this kind of use-specific, built-for-speed databasing system is what most enterprises will need to adopt sooner rather than later to deal with the flood of digital data.

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Harsh Light on Two Men, but Glare Falls on Women

On the opposite coast, news trucks were idling outside the California home of Mildred Patricia Baena, who the world now knows to be the mother of the boy Arnold Schwarzenegger has admitted to fathering while she was his family?s housekeeper.

The harsh scrutiny of Ms. Baena started as soon as her Myspace photos flooded the Internet. She ?would never appear on the cover of Maxim magazine,? wrote a blogger on Forbes.com. Several news outlets repeated a report from the gossip Web site TMZ that Ms. Baena had begun to ?pursue Arnold? in the late 1990s.

Though the circumstances of such cases are sharply different, they nevertheless raise questions and concerns about where attention should be focused. But there is less hesitation to try to reveal every detail of the lives of the women involved, as if those details could somehow explain the headlines about the powerful figures.

?It is part of a fascination with the man,? said Suzanne Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia. ?What sort of woman could this powerful man have been attracted to? I think as a society, we care about the lives of powerful celebritylike figures.?

?That curiosity extends not only to their home decorating, but also to who is in their beds,? she added. ?The women suffer the collateral damage of our interest.?

For all the differences of the two cases ? one involves allegations of sexual assault, the other does not ? they raise similar questions about imbalances of power that continue in some ways after the accusations become public.

The International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was being held in isolation at Rikers Island. But he had high-powered lawyers and, like Mr. Schwarzenegger, highly placed friends and family to defend him. Mr. Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, issued statements insisting on their family?s right to privacy.

The women suddenly thrust into the spotlight must rely instead, at least initially, on neighbors to protect their privacy. In the Bronx, a man who said he was the hotel worker?s brother confessed to a reporter the day after he was quoted in newspapers that in fact, he was not.

The silence from the women inevitably is answered with storylines hastily pieced together.

The housekeeper from the Sofitel in New York, where the assault was said to have occurred, was reported in The New York Post to live in a residence for people with H.I.V. or AIDS. Her lawyer denied that in an interview on ?Today.?

Lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a politician who was viewed as a strong candidate to run against the French president next year, were expected to argue that any sex may have been consensual. At his arraignment this week, they said that the forensic evidence ?will not be consistent with a forcible encounter.? Her lawyer disputed that as well.

Details about Ms. Baena?s life emerged through photographs found on social networking sites. Some Web sites took sides, based on anonymous quotations, saying that she had been the aggressor, that she had liens against her, and that she had, in the words of TMZ, ?decked herself out as a sexy swashbuckler for Halloween? a year before she gave birth to the boy.

Meanwhile, Mr. Schwarzenegger, a two-term governor, was said (again, anonymously) to be ?always generous? with Ms. Baena after the child was born.

Men involved in these kinds of scandals can sometimes have second acts (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Mr. Schwarzenegger has said he will return to making movies, and there has been no suggestion that this scandal will disrupt his plans.

Mr. Spitzer, for his part, said Wednesday on his prime-time show on CNN that ?even if disproven, the reputational harm is never undone? from an accusation like the one leveled at Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Mr. Spitzer did not bring up the scandal that led to his downfall as New York governor.

For the women involved in the scandals, the likelihood of a second act is slight.

News organizations, including The New York Times, have a policy of not naming people who say they were sexually assaulted. (Policies vary in different countries, and some French news outlets did name the woman who has accused Mr. Strauss-Kahn.)

Ms. Baena?s name first surfaced Tuesday night on several gossip Web sites, but could not be independently confirmed with multiple sources until Wednesday morning.

The Los Angeles Times first revealed the existence of the son late Monday, but did not name him or the mother except to say that she had been employed in Mr. Schwarzenegger?s household.

She had worked for the family for about 20 years and retired sometime last year. According to real estate records, Ms. Baena bought her home in Bakersfield, Calif., about 100 miles from the Schwarzenegger home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, about a year ago, for $268,000.

On Wednesday, the quiet cul-de-sac was a maelstrom of television cameras, reporters and onlookers. Several of Ms. Baena?s neighbors complained about the crowd, and police officers were sent to the scene. 

Her one-story home sits at the end of the street in a tidy and trim subdivision. On Wednesday morning, white blinds covered the windows of the tan house with a red-tile roof, and there was no sign of anyone inside.

The children, too, become ? to use Ms. Goldberg?s phrase ? ?collateral damage.? TMZ blurred the face of Ms. Baena?s son in photographs (describing him as the ?spitting image? of his father). But Web sites like OnTheRedCarpet.com linked to Ms. Baena?s Myspace profile, with pictures showing the boy. In the comments space on the profile, some people made cruel judgments.

One woman offered an unsolicited tip: ?Patty ... make your pictures private ... you need to protect your child from the media? and all that goes with it. ?Just some advice,? she said.

Reporting was contributed by Jennifer Medina from Bakersfield, Calif., and Ian Lovett, Ana Facio Contreras and Joel Epstein from Los Angeles.

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Bracing for the Data Deluge

From Facebook to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the world is catalogued in databases. No one knows it better than MIT adjunct professor and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who has spent the last 25 years developing the technology that made it so. He got his big break by inventing and commercializing technology that underlies most of the databases, known as relational databases, that rule today. But Stonebraker now happily calls his earlier inventions largely obsolete. He's working on a new generation of database technology that can handle the flood of digital data that is starting to overwhelm established methods.

"Relational databases are omnipresent as the solution for enterprise data. They have been fabulously successful," Stonebraker says. But he says that the largest database vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, still sell such products as being appropriate for any business. Stonebraker has a different view: that new database technologies are required to handle the exponential increases in the information that businesses must handle. Stonebraker, 67, is already finding success with several of his own new approaches.

One is a database system called C-Store. Unlike most systems in use today, it stores data on disk column by column, not row by row. That simple tweak required a complete rewrite of how databases have worked, but it dovetails neatly with both the way computer memory works and the way databases are accessed. That yields much faster performance and more compressed data.

That tweak and others made by Stonebraker and colleagues at MIT, Brown, Brandeis, Yale, and the University of Massachusetts enabled the launch of Vertica, a company that commercialized C-Store and helped customers to query large databases almost in real time. Vertica was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in February and boasts clients including Comcast, which uses it to monitor the millions of devices that make up its TV and Internet networks, and Groupon, which uses it to analyze the actions of its millions of subscribers.

A related system from Stonebraker and some of the same academic colleagues, H-Store, builds on the same ideas with extra improvements such as running entirely in a computer's memory, not on disk; this method is particularly useful in online transaction processing. H-Store's code is open source, but the technology is being commercialized by venture-backed VoltDB, with Stonebraker as CTO. He argues that this kind of use-specific, built-for-speed databasing system is what most enterprises will need to adopt sooner rather than later to deal with the flood of digital data.

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Going to rob an Apple Store? Don?t do it while the cops are outside.

A group of five thieves weren?t counting on the presence of plainclothes police right outside when they robbed the Las Vegas Apple Store, the Las Vegas Sun reports.

Five thieves entered the Las Vegas Town Center Apple Store  late in the afternoon and began stealing display electronics from the tables. Police were notified over radio, but thanks to a completely unrelated incident, police were already right outside.

Unfortunately, despite the speedy response time, the arrests didn?t go so smoothly. The police managed to take two of the thieves into custody, while the other three got away.

The Sun reports that there have been a series of robberies at local Apple Stores and cellphone retailers, and the police are looking into a connection.

We don?t suggest you go robbing any sort of store for any reason, but for God?s sake, if you?re going to be a thief, learn to be good at it first!

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/05/19/going-to-rob-an-apple-store-dont-do-it-while-the-cops-are-outside/

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Images of a Hard-Hitting Disease

It is estimated that football players can receive as many as 1,500 hits to the head in one season. Not every blow results in immediate injury, but a growing body of research suggests that repetitive hits can lead to serious, long-term brain damage. More than 20 NFL players have so far been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease, after their deaths.

Researchers at Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (BU CSTE) are now using sophisticated imaging techniques to detect signs of this damage in living patients, work that could lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon, and help identify at-risk athletes. CTE is currently diagnosed through examining a patient's brain tissue under a microscope.

In February, the BU researchers examined the brain of Dave Duerson, a retired pro football player who committed suicide after suffering from symptoms tied to repetitive brain trauma, including memory loss, poor impulse control, and erratic behavior. Duerson, who played 11 seasons in the NFL, became the 14th player diagnosed with CTE out of the 15 NFL players the center has studied.

"CTE is becoming a widely recognized disease; it is part of the expanding knowledge of traumatic brain injury that has exploded in the last few years," says Julian Bailes, professor and chairman of the department of neurosurgery and the director of the Brain Injury Research Institute (BIRI) at West Virginia University, the only other institute studying the disease. "We don't yet know how big the problem really is?is it a few percent of players that have the disease, or more than that?" Bailes says.

In collaboration with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the BU researchers recently conducted a pilot study, which involved imaging the brains of five professional athletes known to have experienced repetitive head trauma, and five age-matched nonathlete subjects without any history of head trauma. A similar, but much larger, three-year study is expected to start this summer.

CTE is marked by the progressive degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein, which provides structural support for the microtubules that transmit molecules between cells and neurons, down the axonal tracks. It's thought that repetitive hits to the head cause these microtubules to stretch, swell, and fall apart, so the cell can't function and the tau protein starts clumping together.

The researchers used different imaging techniques to detect these changes in the brain. They used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a variation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to examine the complex network of nerve fibers that connect different brain areas. DTI tracks the movement of water molecules through the brain, so researchers can create a detailed picture of the axons by analyzing the direction of water diffusion.

The researchers saw fewer axonal connections between neurons and fibers in the pilot study subjects who had a history of head impacts. "It was very apparent when we put the images side by side that the athletes have advanced atrophy or areas where fiber tracks have disappeared," says Christopher Nowinski, codirector of CSTE and co-founder and president of the Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Waltham, Massachusetts, that studies brain injury in athletes and was involved with the project.

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Focus Is on Obama as Tensions Soar Across Mideast

Against the backdrop of Middle East uprisings that have intensified animus toward Israel and growing momentum for global recognition of a Palestinian state, American and Israeli officials are struggling to balance national security interests against the need to adapt to a transformative movement in the Arab world.

The White House unveiled a $2 billion multiyear economic aid package for Egypt, which officials say would largely shift existing funds. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel prepared to arrive in Washington with a package that he hoped would shift the burden of restarting the peace process to the Palestinians.

Mr. Obama, who is set to address Americans ? and, more significantly, Muslims around the world ? from the State Department on Thursday morning, may yet have something surprising up his sleeve. One administration official said that there remained debate about whether Mr. Obama would formally endorse Israel?s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state, a move that would send an oratorical signal that the United States expected Israel to make concessions.

But Mr. Obama did not plan to present an American blueprint for peace, White House officials said, and it remained unclear if he would even endorse a Palestinian state on pre-1967 lines, a move opposed, administration officials said, by his chief Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross. Mr. Obama did seek to increase pressure on Syria by imposing largely symbolic sanctions on its leader, President Bashar al-Assad, in the wake of the bloody crackdown there.

White House officials declined to say whether Mr. Obama would go further in Thursday?s speech and call on Mr. Assad to resign.

The debate around Mr. Obama?s remarks, which the White House has billed as a major address, is made even more significant since the president?s speech will serve as the beginning of what promises to be several intense days of debate over American policy in the region, its support for Palestinian statehood, and how far Mr. Obama is willing to push Israel on peace with the Palestinians at a time of upheaval in the region. Mr. Obama is to meet with Mr. Netanyahu the day after his speech, on Friday. Two days after that, Mr. Obama is scheduled to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby. Next week, Mr. Netanyahu will counter with his own address to a joint meeting of Congress.

Mr. Netanyahu, aides say, is planning to tell Mr. Obama that Israel wants to keep a military presence along the Jordan River and sovereignty over Jerusalem and the settlement blocs ? three major stumbling blocks for the Palestinians ? but that it would be willing to negotiate away the rest of the West Bank, more territory than Mr. Netanyahu has been willing to specify in the past. He has one condition ? the Palestinian government cannot include Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu knows that the Palestinians will find this condition unacceptable, particularly since Fatah, the main Palestinian movement, just signed a unity pact with Hamas. But since the United States labels Hamas as terrorists, Mr. Netanyahu is betting that he will appear more forthcoming than ever.

?On the one hand, the Palestinians are moving toward Hamas while on the other, the prime minister is showing a real willingness to make far-reaching territorial compromise,? a top Netanyahu aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Whether Mr. Netanyahu?s offer, first outlined in a speech to Parliament on Monday, is a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, or to make it appear that the Palestinians are the ones blocking progress, is not yet clear. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as their capital and do not want Israeli soldiers along the Jordan.

Diplomatic momentum has been with the Palestinians for several years, with their leadership and requests viewed as reasonable and Mr. Netanyahu as unyielding. Some in Israel believe now is the time to seize the moment with a bold initiative, but they are not in power. ?The coming days are a final chance to stop or at least to slow Israel?s diplomatic decline,? Dov Weissglas, who was bureau chief for Ariel Sharon when he was prime minister, wrote in Wednesday?s Yediot Aharonot newspaper. He wants a more far-reaching offer from Mr. Netanyahu that would give up East Jerusalem and not require that Israel keep soldiers along the Jordan.

While there are Israeli scholars and former officials who believe that Hamas, which rules Gaza, could become more moderate, the dominant intelligence estimate in Israel is that Hamas will not change. ?We have a strong body of evidence showing that while Hamas has grown pragmatic, it is not moderate,? a senior Israeli defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. ?It is far more likely that Hamas will take over the Palestinian Authority than vice versa.?

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem. Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

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