The Palestinian leadership is making medium-term preparations to go to the United Nations to ask for a declaration of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders (i.e. in the West Bank and Gaza).

The move comes because the Obama administration's attempts to kickstart the peace process have crashed and burned, as Elaf pointed out. The Obama team told far rightwing Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Israel was to cease creating new colonies on the West Bank in preparation for the resumption of talks. Netanyahu defied Obama, insisting that new Israeli squatter settlements would be started in the Palestinian West Bank.

The Palestinian leadership had made an Israeli settlement freeze a prerequisite for new talks, and so refused to sit down with the Israelis as long as the latter were stealing ever more Palestinian land.

Donald Bostrom didn't know he needed this. With Moses, a gigantic bodyguard in a suit and tie watching over his Tel Aviv hotel room with an earpiece and a concealed gun; with a handful of demonstrators who greeted him in the wee hours of the morning at Ben-Gurion International Airport; and with the program for his visit to Israel, in which it is explained that during his trip to attend the Dimona Media Conference, he will be accompanied by two bodyguards, that the details of his visit will be "classified" and that he will wait in a "security room" before and after an interview to be conducted with him today by Yair Lapid.

Donald Bostrom didn't know he needed this. He arrived here Sunday, in an attempt to explain to Israelis what he meant in his scandalous article about alleged organ harvesting by the Israel Defense Forces - a brave step on his part and a no-less-brave step on the part of the organizers of the Dimona conference - who were already attacked by Minister Silvan Shalom, who decided to boycott the gathering and withdraw the money his ministry had pledged to the conference.

"Is it possible here to retroactively cancel an allocation for a conference?" asks the musician and exiled artist Dror Feiler, who is accompanying Bostrom on his visit, and who also had a scandal in his past, the scandal of the blood in the "Snow White and The Madness of Truth" installation he exhibited in Stockholm in January 2004. Bostrom seems a little embarrassed about the reception he is getting. We ate breakfast at his hotel, which borders on Am Yisrael Hai ("the people of Israel live") Street, and then we went up to his room which overlooks the sea. There he showed me the pictures he had taken of the body of the stone thrower, Bilal Ghanan, from the village of Imatin in the northern West Bank who had been shot by IDF soldiers on May 13, 1992.

The mortally wounded Ghanan was evacuated to the hospital by an Israel army helicopter and his dead body was returned to his family five days later, sewn up along its length, while Bostrom was in the village. Bostrom says the family is entitled to know what happened to their son, why his body was autopsied without his family's permission and whether the rumors are correct that his internal organs were removed at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine.

After Israel released photos it said proved that a huge shipment of weapons for Hezbollah came from Tehran, Iranian news agencies publish evidence showing that the photos are forged.

Israeli naval sources recently claimed that they found a large cache of Iranian-made arms when they stormed a vessel near Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

They claimed that the ship was heading for the Hezbollah resistance movement, either in Lebanon or Syria.

Iran instantly dismissed the claims, issuing a statement with which it condemned Israel's many acts of piracy in international waters.

Judge Richard Goldstone told Haaretz Thursday that President Shimon Peres' remarks criticizing him were "specious and ill-befitting the head of State of Israel."

Peres was quoted Wednesday as calling Goldstone "a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence," who was "on a one-sided mission to hurt Israel."

In Thursday's interview by e-mail with Haaretz, Goldstone said: "I am content to be judged by my actions over the course of my career both in terms of my professional judicial career and my voluntary service."

Iraqi former battle zone sees abnormal clusters of infant tumours and deformities

Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects - which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems - are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women's affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war - including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted.