The White House has announced that the US president will host three-way talks with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Tuesday.

Barack Obama is due to meet Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, separately before the three go into a joint session, the White House said.

The meeting is expected to take place in New York before a session of the United Nations General Assembly, the White House said, ”to lay the groundwork for the relaunch of negotiations, and to create a positive context for those negotiations so that they can succeed”.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, welcomed Obama’s personal involvment in the peace process, but indicated low Palestinian expectations for a positive outcome.

“At this point, I think President Obama must convey to the world that one side is undermining efforts to resolve the peace process,” he told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

“This meeting is not about resuming negotiations. I don’t think we will come out of this meeting with Netanyahu agreeing to resume negotiations or stop settlement expansion.”

‘Comprehensive peace’

Talks have been stalled since Israel launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip last December and Abbas has repeatedly said that they will not restart until Israel commits to a complete freeze of settlement building in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.

George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, wrapped up a mission to the Middle East on Friday having failed to secure the concessions necessary for the peace process to resume.

He said that the three-way meeting planned for Tuesday showed Obama’s “deep commitment to comprehensive peace”.Al Jazeera’s John Terrett, reporting from Washington DC, said: “The general assumption was that George Mitchell was flying back to Washington a failure.

“After half a dozen trips to the Middle East he had failed to secure a trilateral meeting at the UN General Assembly next week.

“I suspect the Americans would have preferred to keep the drama going right the way through the opening stages of the General Assembly and out late as Wednesday or Thursday.”

Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to commit to either a permanent stop to settlement expansion, as demanded by the Palestinians, or the year-long halt that Washington was believed to be calling for.

Instead he has suggested that Israel could be prepared to stop building new settlements for six months while negotiations resume.

‘Commitments and agreements’

Maen Areikat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) mission to the US, said that no conditions had been attached to Tuesday’s planned talks.

“We haven’t laid down any conditions. We have been asking all along for all parties to meet their obligations,” he told Al Jazeera from Washington DC.

“We Palestinians feel that we have met a lot of our obligations under previous commitments and agreements and phase one of the road map [for peace].”Israel so far has failed to meet any of their obligations.”

Areikat said that the efforts of the Obama administration were encouraging but “we will have to see what kind of discussions we will have on Tuesday”.

But Akiva Eldar, the chief political columnist for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, said that it was Abbas that would be under pressure going into the meeting.

“He can’t afford to go home empty handed again, and what I mean by empty handed is without a full commitment from the Israelis to stop all the operations in the settlements,” he said.

“[Netanyahu] can come out of the meeting with President Obama and can say something such as ‘we have agreed on some formula that will alllow the settlers, especially those in Jerusalem, to maintain a normal life’.”

More than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements on land occupied by Israel following the 1967 war, land that the Palestinians see as vital to any future independent state.

‘Unrealistic demand’

Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli national security adviser currently with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told Al Jazeera that the Palestinians’ demand for a total end to all settlement building was ultimately impossible.

“The demand that there be a total and complete Israeli freeze not only in the West Bank as a whole, but including Jerusalem, was an unrealistic demand,” he said.

“No Israeli prime minister could have agreed to that.”

Meanwhile, Ismail Haniya, the deposed Palestinian prime minister and Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, condemned Abbas’s decision to meet Netanyahu.

Speaking at prayers in Gaza for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Haniya said “it does not obligate the Palestinian people to anything”.

“No one is authorised, not the PLO nor anyone else, to sign any agreement that violates the rights of the nation and the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Source: Aljazeera and agencies

And if theteddy bear Muhammed fiasco in Sudan is anything to go by, it should come as no true surprise to find people with Islamic names wherever one may be in the world. This article is devoted to Islamic baby names.

Giving a name to your child is one of the most important duties of parents so that he/she can be proud of his/her name in the later stages of life. In Islam, names are always chosen with good and beautiful meaning. Azra, Dalal, Asif, and Isam are all just a few examples of Islamic baby names. And it doesn’t take a great deal of research to acknowledge that these names are based on Arabic names for all that is good, pure, virtuous, what you have.

But it is true that some of these names are given only to boys and some only to girls.
There is something of likeliness that people of non-Islam origin may have Islamic baby names or, more simply, just an Islamic name. At least, it is believable, when the name George is taken from the Greek word for farmer. And like Islamic baby names, it would seem that people who make up non-Islamic names are given to kindness; the description continues, He is reserved, friendly, kind and reliable and won’t take you for granted. He is a loyal, steady man.

Source: Parenting Area

The fact that children raised in homes without a dad have sex earlier is down to their genes, say US researchers.

The study tested for genetic influences as well as factors such as poverty, educational opportunities and religion.

The more genes the children shared, the more similar their ages of first intercourse regardless of whether they had an absent father or not.

A spokesman for the charity, Brook, said children needed early education to help them make informed choices.

Competing theories

The study published in the journal, Child Development, says several theories have been advanced about the environmental factors which influence this association between absent fathers and early sex.

One suggests that because these children observe unstable or stressed parental relationships, they learn that resources are scarce, and people untrustworthy.

This leads them to mature in such a way that they are geared towards mating rather than parenting.

While there is clearly no such thing as a ‘father absence gene’, there are genetic contributions to traits in both mums and dads that increase the likelihood of earlier sexual behaviour in their children Jane Mendle, University of Oregon

Another states that because adolescents reared in single-parent households may have parents engaging in sexual behaviour with partners to whom they are not married, the children may be more likely to view non-marital sex as the norm.

And a third theory states that a single-parent family structure may encourage adolescent sexuality by reduced parental control.

In other words two parents can much more closely monitor their offspring’s activities and social networks, reducing the opportunities for sex.

But this study shows these factors are not as important as genes in determining early sexual behaviour.

Results

The researchers at the University of Oregon compared the average age of first intercourse among children whose fathers were always absent, partially absent or always present throughout childhood.

They looked at more than 1,000 cousins aged 14 and older from the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

For the children whose fathers were always absent, 63.2% reported having had sex.

This compared to 52.5% of children whose fathers were sometimes absent.

And only 21% of children whose fathers were always present.

The average age of first intercourse for children whose fathers were always absent was 15.28, compared to partially fathered children at 15.36 and 16.11 for children whose fathers were present for all of their childhood.

It compared children who were related in different ways to each other, and who differed in whether they had lived with their fathers.

The more genes the children shared, the more similar their ages of first intercourse, regardless of whether or not the children had an absent father.

Genetic risk factor

Jane Mendle, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who led the study said: “The association between father’s absence and children’s sexuality is best explained by genetic influences, rather than by environmental theories alone.

“While there is clearly no such thing as a ‘father absence gene’, there are genetic contributions to traits in both mums and dads that increase the likelihood of earlier sexual behaviour in their children.

All young people need access to confidential sexual health services as well as high quality education about sex and relationships from a young age Simon Blake, Brook Advisory Centre

“These include impulsivity, substance use and abuse, argumentativeness and sensation seeking.”

But Professor Mendle said her study did not have the power to discriminate conclusively between genetic and environmental factors and further research with a larger number of children would be necessary.

Simon Blake, from the sexual health charity, Brook Advisory Centre, took issue with the idea that genes were the overriding factor in early sex.

He said: “We know from research that factors associated with young people having first intercourse at a younger age are: lower educational achievements; friends and the media being the main source of information about sex education; socio-economic status; early sexual experience and the earlier age at which girls start their periods.

“All young people need access to confidential sexual health services as well as high quality education about sex and relationships from a young age.

“This gives them the skills and information to make informed choices, and the self-esteem and aspirations for themselves for the future.

“Targeted outreach work is also an effective way of reaching those more vulnerable groups.”

Source: BBC

MEAD GRUVER, Associated Press Writer

As for the other half, no one knows.

District-by-district and school-by-school results from this year’s Proficiency Assessments for Wyoming Students, or PAWS test, have been out for nearly a month. But state and local officials have yet to compile a complete set of scores for the Wyoming Virtual School.

Wyoming Virtual School students essentially are home-schooled with some guidance from public school teachers. The partly online curriculum is provided by a private company, Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc.

Campbell County School District 1 in Gillette launched the K-6 school in 2006 and enrolled 76 students last year.

This was the first year more than a handful of students in the virtual school took the assessment test, an annual, statewide exam for students in grades 3-8 and 11. The virtual school students took the test in classrooms, not at home.

The available results — the combined scores of about 30 students in Campbell County — show less-than-stellar performance:

— Fifty percent of Wyoming Virtual School students in grades 3-6 scored in either the “proficient” range or “advanced” range in math. The statewide average for grades 3-6 was 76 percent.

— In reading, 41 percent of Wyoming Virtual School students tested in the proficient range or above. The statewide average was 64 percent.

— In writing, 22 percent of Wyoming Virtual School students scored in the proficient range or higher. The statewide average in writing was 53 percent.

“We’re not where we want to be. We’ll continue to work to improve and to raise those numbers in the future,” said Alex Ayers, the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and assessment.

K12 Inc. said it didn’t have enough information about the test scores to comment.

While the Campbell County School District compiled test scores for virtual school students who live in Campbell County, the district has yet to obtain scores from students elsewhere in the state.

About half of the virtual school’s students last school year lived in 10 other counties. The reason the Campbell County district doesn’t have those scores is the state Department of Education combined them with scores at brick-and-mortar elementary schools — the schools those students would be attending if they weren’t enrolled at the virtual school.

The principal of the virtual school, Roger Larsen, said he’s been trying to collect the rest of his students’ scores from other districts. He called the situation frustrating.

“The scores get scattered around the state, and just trying to gather them up we’ve found much more difficult than anticipated,” Larsen said.

The department eventually should be able to compile a complete set of scores for the Wyoming Virtual School, said Mary Kay Hill, the department’s director of administration.

“As we move along, you bet. We will be building a system that will allow us to pull up that data and be able to report, statewide, how those kids are doing,” she said.

(© 2009 The Associated Press.

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