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RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) –
US Vice President Joe Biden told Palestinian leaders on Wednesday that Washington will hold accountable any side that hurts peace prospects, pointedly citing Israel’s settlement expansion plans.

He also pledged US support for a viable Palestinian state and put his full weight behind indirect talks the Palestinians reluctantly agreed to hold with Israel after a 14-month hiatus.

“I promise you, Mr President,” he said, turning to Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, “the United States will also stand with those who take the risks that peace requires.”

Speaking to journalists after his talks with Abbas, Biden strongly condemned Israel’s green light for the construction of 1,600 settler homes in annexed Arab east Jerusalem, which was announced while he held talks with Israeli leaders on Tuesday.

“As we move forward, the United States will hold both sides accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks as this decision did,” he told journalists in Ramallah, the political capital of the occupied West Bank.

“It is incumbent on all parties to grow an atmosphere of support for the negotiations and not to complicate them.”

Abbas said Israel’s announcement, and an earlier decision to build 112 new homes for settlers in the West Bank “undermine trust and deal a severe blow to efforts deployed over the past months to start indirect negotiations.”

The Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the capital of their promised state. Israel considers the city its eternal and indivisible capital. It seized east Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later annexed it in a move not recognised by the international community.

Biden had hoped his meetings in Jerusalem and Ramallah would serve to boost the indirect talks Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to hold after the Palestinians ruled out any direct negotiations without an Israeli freeze on settlement expansion.

“The United States considers the goal to be not only in the interests of the Palestinians and the Israelis but in the United States’ interests as well. We also believe that the gaps between the Israelis and the Palestinians can only be resolved by negotiations. The indirect talks being launched should lead to direct negotiations,” he said.

“Our administration is fully committed to the Palestinian people and to achieving a Palestinian state which is viable and contiguous,” Biden said.

But his visit was overshadowed by the east Jerusalem settlement expansion announcement, which drew widespread international criticism.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon stressed that “settlements are illegal under international law,” EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton urged Israel to reverse the decision and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called the plan “a bad decision” that “will give strength to those who argue that Israel is not serious about peace.”

Representatives of Arab states planned to discuss the issue later Wednesday with Arab League chief Amr Mussa.

“The insult has reached a point that not a single Arab could accept,” Mussa told reporters. “Israel does not care about anybody, neither the mediator, nor the Palestinians.”

Even the office of Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak issued a statement expressing “anger after the unwarranted announcement which affects peace negotiations with the Palestinians — negotiations of the highest interest for Israel.”

Israeli media were near-unanimous in condemning the government’s move, which the Haaretz newspaper called a “slap heard round the world.”

Maariv pointed out that Biden had hoped to restore the chemistry between the White House and Israel. “And what happened? Within 15 minutes we lost him too.”

Washington has pushed for months to have both sides resume talks, but direct negotiations have been on hold since Israel launched a devastating 22-day offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in December 2008.

On Wednesday evening, Biden visited a stone quarry in Bethlehem with Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, and bought a small gold cross at a souvenir store.

After sitting down to an opulent Middle Eastern feast with Palestinian civil society leaders later, Biden joked: “You know the only drawback to going to dinner with you guys? I eat so much. Every time I’m here I gain three pounds.”

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) –
Militants armed with guns and grenades stormed the offices of a US-based Christian charity in Pakistan on Wednesday, killing six aid workers in an attack blamed on Islamist rebels.

The gunmen stormed the World Vision building near the town of Oghi in the Mansehra district of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have waged a deadly campaign.

The aid group condemned the attack as “brutal and senseless”, and indefinitely suspended all of World Vision?s operations in Pakistan, where it has about 300 staff.

World Vision said six Pakistani employees, including two women, were killed and seven others wounded when up to 15 gunmen arrived in pick-up vehicles and began firing on the aid workers.

“They gathered all of us in one room. The gunmen, some of whom had their faces covered, also snatched our mobile phones,” said World Vision administration officer Mohammad Sajid, who was in the office at the time.

“They dragged people one by one and shifted to an adjacent room and shot and killed them… After that one of them said: ‘It is enough, we should leave now’. While leaving they lobbed grenades.”

Rienk van Velzen, World Vision’s regional communications director, told AFP by telephone from the Netherlands that all staff in the office were Pakistani.

“We have four male and two female staff members killed,” he said.

The organisation has operated in the area since October 2005, when aid workers flooded into the northwest after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless.

But many charities have left the area, as Islamist violence has soared. In February 2008, four aid workers with British-based group Plan International were killed in a similar gun and grenade attack in Mansehra town.

Police officials said the militants on Wednesday opened fire and detonated hand grenades at the site near Oghi, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Islamabad, before disappearing into the mountains.

“Police rushed to the area after receiving information about the attack, but the attackers managed to flee,” senior police officer Waqar Ahmed told AFP.

Ahmed blamed the attack on “the same people who are destroying our schools” — a reference to Taliban militants opposed to co-education who have blown up hundreds of schools across the northwest in the past three years.

A wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan has killed more than 3,000 people since 2007. Blame has fallen on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants bitterly opposed to the country’s alliance with the United States.

But Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said he was unaware of Wednesday’s attack, telling AFP by telephone: “I have no knowledge about the incident and would not like to offer any comment.”

World Vision’s website describes the group as “a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation” founded by a US reverend.

It says the aid group is “inspired by our Christian values”, but stresses that the organisation does not proselytise or condition aid on faith.

The United Nations decided last year to relocate a limited number of its international staff from Pakistan because of security concerns.

The UN’s World Food Programme office in Islamabad was attacked last October, with five workers killed in a suicide bombing.

On February 3, a bomb attack in NWFP killed three American soldiers and five other people at the opening of a school just rebuilt with Western funding after an Islamist attack.

In talks in Islamabad with Hamid Karzai, the president of neighbouring Afghanistan, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday called for a “Marshall Plan” to banish Taliban militancy from the two countries for good.

Afghanistan and Pakistan should “stand together and persuade the international community to devise a Marshall Plan for the region to banish the militancy and its effects for all time to come,” Zardari said, referring to the US initiative launched in 1947 to rebuild western Europe after World War II.

The United States has tripled non-military aid to Pakistan to 7.5 billion dollars over the next five years as it tries to help stabilise the country. It also operates a covert drone war against militants in the northwest of Pakistan.

Two US missile strikes on Wednesday killed at least 12 militants in the tribal region of North Waziristan, officials said.

JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) –
Sporadic shooting rang out overnight in the central Nigerian city of Jos and witnesses said at least one person was killed by soldiers enforcing a curfew days after attacks on three nearby Christian villages.

Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south, has been tense since raiders attacked the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat just south of the city on Sunday, violence in which hundreds are feared to have died.

Fierce competition for control of fertile farmlands between Christian and animist indigenous groups and Muslim settlers from the north have repeatedly triggered unrest over the past decade.

Retaliatory attacks are not uncommon and Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has put the security forces on red alert to try to prevent unrest from spreading to neighboring states at the heart of Africa’s most populous nation.

“Last night until this morning everybody kept vigil. Nobody slept,” said Felvis Aduba, a Jos resident who owns a shop selling electronic goods.

Jos was already under a dusk-to-dawn curfew after clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in January which killed more than 400 people, according to community leaders.

Aduba said the city had been put on edge by SMS messages sent to mobile phones warning that militants from the Muslim Hausa-Fulani ethnic group, blamed for Sunday’s attacks, were coming from the northern city of Maiduguri to wage war.

Gangs of youths gathered in self-defense, witnesses said.

Gunfire also rang out from the Tudun Wada neighborhood of the city overnight, where residents said panic was sown when a resident from another state received a truckload of cows.

Many of the herders around Jos are Hausa-Fulani and when a vigilante group saw the animals, they took the man for a northern Muslim and mobbed him, before the security forces opened fire to disperse them, killing one person.

POPE SENDS CONDOLENCES

The latest unrest at the heart of the oil-producing nation comes at a turbulent time, with Acting President Jonathan trying to assert his authority while ailing leader Umaru Yar’Adua remains too sick to govern.

The United Nations, United States, rights groups and opposition politicians have all urged the authorities to ensure those responsible face justice and called on the security forces to protect civilians.

“My deepest condolences to the victims of the atrocious violence which has bloodied Nigeria and which has not even spared defenseless babies,” Pope Benedict said in Rome.

“Once again, with a sorrowful heart, I repeat that violence does not solve conflicts but only worsens their tragic consequences … I call all those in the country who have civil or religious authority to work for the security and peaceful coexistence of the whole population,” he said.

Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang on Tuesday blamed the military, which took control of security in January, for failing to respond to his warning that movements of armed men had been reported by villagers shortly before Sunday’s attacks.

Police have made 93 arrests but rights groups are concerned that those responsible may not actually be prosecuted.

More than 300 people were arrested in January and about half of them were due to be sent to the capital Abuja for prosecution, but it is unclear how many actually faced justice.

Local officials said many of those responsible for January’s violence were the same people arrested but not prosecuted after similar unrest in November 2008.

(Additional reporting by Daniel Flynn in Rome; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Giles Elgood)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
A Pennsylvania woman has been charged with plotting to kill a Swedish man and trying to recruit fighters via the Internet to commit violent attacks overseas, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

Colleen LaRose, who also went by the pseudonym of “Fatima LaRose” and “JihadJane,” was charged with conspiracy to commit murder overseas, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists, making false statements and attempted identity theft.

LaRose posted a comment on YouTube in June 2008 that she wanted to help “the suffering Muslim people.” She sent emails to unnamed co-conspirators offering to become a martyr as well as to use her American background to avoid detection, according to the indictment filed in a federal court in Pennsylvania.

The indictment accused LaRose of agreeing in March 2009 to marry a co-conspirator from a South Asian country and try to obtain residency in Europe. He urged her to go to Sweden, find the unnamed Swedish man “and kill him.”

Also on Tuesday, Irish police said seven people had been arrested there in connection with a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilk, over a 2007 drawing depicting the Prophet Muhammed with the body of a dog.

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on whether the cases were connected.

“Today’s indictment, which alleges that a woman from suburban America agreed to carry out murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face,” David Kris, head of the department’s national security division, said in a statement.

The Obama administration has grown increasingly worried about Americans and foreigners living in the United States taking up the cause of anti-American militants and launching attacks here or abroad.

Two recent cases have fueled those concerns: the arrest of a Chicago man accused of helping plot the 2008 Mumbai attacks and an Afghan immigrant living in Colorado who pleaded guilty to plotting a bomb attack on the New York subway system.

In the Pennsylvania case, LaRose was accused of traveling to Europe in August 2009 and tracking online her intended murder target in Sweden, according to the indictment. It also said she tried to raise money over the Internet, lure others to her cause and lied to FBI investigators.

“This case also demonstrates that terrorists are looking for Americans to join them in their cause, and it shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance,” Michael Levy, the U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

After returning to the United States, LaRose was arrested in October 2009 on a charge related to the theft of a U.S. passport, court documents showed.

If convicted on the four counts in the indictment, which was dated March 4, 2010, LaRose could face a sentence of life in prison and a $1 million fine.

(Editing by Chris Wilson)