More news from around the world in brief.
Olmert ready for 'painful concessions'
JERUSALEM - Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has marked Israel's annual memorial day for fallen soldiers with a new call for peace, saying his country is prepared to make "far- reaching compromises" and "very painful concessions".
However he also sounded a defiant note after a weekend of fighting that left nine Palestinians dead. The Israeli leader yesterday said his country would hit militants "until they are destroyed".
Mr Olmert's speech was an effort to strike a balancing act between appealing for peace and projecting strength on a memorial day made poignant by the deaths of 119 soldiers in last summer's war in Lebanon. - (AP)
Lula calls for system overhaul
BRASILIA - Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has asked for opposition support to overhaul a political system vulnerable to corruption and said he would not seek a third term in 2010.
In the more than six months since Mr Lula was re-elected on October 30th, he has been able to negotiate an 11-party alliance that has a majority in both houses of Congress.
However disagreement on political reform within the alliance has forced him to seek opposition support for proposals to limit the ability of lawmakers to switch parties and tighten campaign financing rules. - (Reuters)
UN official backs Sudan sanctions
LUXEMBOURG - A senior United Nations official says the threat of sanctions against Sudan could help to secure a political breakthrough in the Darfur crisis.
US president George W Bush warned Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al- Bashir, last week he had one last chance to stop violence in Darfur or the United States would impose sanctions and consider other punitive options. - (Reuters)
Lagerfeld once a target for kidnap
BERLIN - German terrorists once planned to kidnap fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld as part of a scheme to free fellow guerrillas from jail.
A former member of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader- Meinhof gang, which terrorised Germany throughout the 1970s and 1980s with murders, kidnappings and bank robberies, said Mr Lagerfeld was viewed as a perfect target because of his personal wealth.
Convicted terrorist Peter- Jurgen Boock, who is out of prison having served 17 years, said the designer was the most prominent of "an array of people with a large fortune on whom we collected information with a view to kidnapping them". - (Guardian service)
Bernstein book on Hillary Clinton
LOS ANGELES - Former Washington Postreporter Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward helped expose the Watergate scandal, has spent eight years researching the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton and will publish a 640-page biography of her in June.
The book, to be published by Alfred A Knopf, will have a first printing of 350,000 copies in the United States, a Knopf spokesman said. - (Reuters)
12 years for Cuban dissident
HAVANA - A Cuban dissident who wrote "Down with Fidel Castro" and other opposition slogans on walls of public buildings was sentenced to 12 years in jail, a human rights group has said. Rolando Jimenez had been held without charges since his arrest in March 2003, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights said.
Amnesty International declared Mr Jimenez a prisoner of conscience in 2004. - (Reuters)