The Presidential Advisor, Dr. Mustafa Osman Ismail, has affirmed that east Sudan obtains tremendous wealth and potentialities that can make a change and a qualitative shift if they are exploited.

Addressing a meeting for briefing on the ongoing preparations for the Donors' conference for East Sudan, scheduled for in next November in Kuwait, Dr. Ismail lauded East Sudan Agreement which focused on the development and stability of east Sudan.

He said that all the arrangements were finalized for establishment of the projects through funding from the donors in the fields of services development.

The Director General of tEast Sudan Development Fund, Engineer Abu-Obieda Duj, affirmed completion of the arrangements for implementing development and investment projects at a cost of three billion US dollars for the three states of east Sudan.

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By BOB SALSBERG, Associated Press Writer

CHATHAM, Mass. – A weakening Hurricane Earl swiped past North Carolina on Friday on its way to New England, where officials warned residents that it still packed dangerous winds that could topple trees or damage the area's picturesque gray-shingled cottages.

Earl dropped to a Category 1 storm — down from a powerful Category 4 a day earlier — with sustained winds of 80 mph. The storm could weaken to a tropical storm by the time it passes about 50 to 75 miles southeast of Nantucket on Friday night, said National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read.

"The good news on Earl is it has been steadily weakening, maybe even a little quicker than forecast," Read said.

Nantucket police chief William Pittman warned island residents against complacency, saying Earl was "still a dangerous storm" with severe winds that could be stronger than those carried by the gusty nor'easters the island is used to absorbing.

The National Hurricane Center reduced the New England areas under a hurricane warning to just Cape Cod and the islands. The rest of the New England coast remained under tropical storm warnings and watches.

As of 2 p.m. EDT, Earl's center was located about 290 miles (465 kilometers) south-southwest of Nantucket, Mass., and moving north-northeast at nearly 21 mph (33 kph).

Most of the hurricane force winds were expected to remain offshore. The National Weather Service was forecasting winds up to 65 mph on Nantucket with gusts up to 85 mph. On Cape Cod, winds up to 45 mph with gusts of up to 60 mph were expected.

Earl sideswiped North Carolina's Outer Banks early Friday, flooding the vacation islands but causing no injuries and little damage. The storm's winds had dropped by then to 105 mph from 145 mph a day before.

Hurricane-force winds, which start at 74 mph, apparently did not reach the Outer Banks, said the National Hurricane Center's chief forecaster, James Franklin. Officials had urged some 35,000 visitors and residents on the Outer Banks to leave the dangerously exposed islands as the storm closed in, but hundreds chose to wait it out in their boarded-up homes.

Nancy Scarborough of Hatteras said she had about a foot of water underneath her home, which is on stilts. "Once it goes down, it shouldn't take long to get things back together," she said.

In New Jersey, authorities on Friday called off a search for the second victim of rough surf this week. Pardip Singh, of Carteret, entered the ocean Thursday night with a group of people in Belmar but did not emerge. His disappearance came on the same day that authorities recovered the body of a 23-year-old Asbury Park man who drowned after entering the roiling waters Tuesday.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency Thursday as he urged residents not to panic.

On Friday, many seemed to be following his advice. Traffic was light on both bridges to and from Cape Cod, where the air was still and heavy rains started in the late morning.

In downtown Chatham, a quaint fishing village at Cape Cod's eastern edge, tourists strolled the bookstores, cafes, candy shops and ice cream parlors on Main Street, largely unconcerned about the coming storm.

A handful of stores had put plywood over their windows, including the Ben Franklin Old Fashioned Variety Store. "C'mon Earl, we're ready for you," a handwritten note read.

In a parking lot near downtown, five large utility trucks sat waiting and linemen milled about, ready to fix any possible power outages. A handful of people walked on a beach nearby, the waves gently lapping the sand.

In Barnstable, Ellen McDonough, of Boston, and a friend were waiting Friday morning for one of the last ferries to Nantucket before service was stopped around noon. The two had planned a Labor Day weekend getaway to the island and didn't see Earl as a good reason to cancel.

"It's not a three-foot snow storm. I think us New Englanders are tough," McDonough said. "We've had this weekend planned, and no hurricane is going to stop us."

Scott Thomas, president of the Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce, said island residents were taking the coming storm in stride.

"This is not something that is really unheard of for us, in terms of being prepped for it and being ready to handle something like this," he said. "We kind of roll with the punches out here; it's not a huge deal for us."

Thomas Kinton Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan International Airport in Boston, said he didn't expect major commercial airlines to cancel flights because of Earl. Cape Air, which serves Cape Cod, will be ending its flights at midday Friday, he said.

"The potential impacts to (Logan) airport are lessening as the hurricane gets closer," Kinton said.

In New York City, officials were on alert but said they expected to see only side effects of the storm — mostly rain and high winds, with possible soil erosion on the beaches and flooding along the oceanside coasts of Brooklyn and Queens.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Donald Carcieri signed a disaster declaration Thursday, giving emergency workers access to state and federal resources to deal with problems that may be caused by the hurricane. Block Island, a popular Rhode Island tourist destination, was expected to gusts as high as 60 mph.

At Acadia National Park in Maine officials closed most of a road where thousands of visitors gathered last year to watch the swells from Hurricane Bill, and a 20-foot wave swept a 7-year-old girl to her death.

Just off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, some island residents decided to play it safe and return to the mainland.

Robert Bohlmann, emergency management agency director in York County, Maine, said some homes on the rocky Isles of Shoals belong to fishermen who have no intention of leaving.

"You couldn't get them off the island if you dragged them," Bohlmann said. "It's their homes and they're don't want to leave."

By TONY KARON, TIME

Rather than previewing their peace proposals, the protagonists in this week's Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington made sure everyone knew their version of who is to blame for the negotiation's widely anticipated failure. Not surprising, really, because each side's position is well known to the other, and the odds of talks bridging the gap - even "direct" ones, as opposed to those called "proximity," i.e., mediated by a shuttling U.S. diplomat - remain long.

The Palestinians warn that there will be no agreement if Israel continues expanding its settlements on occupied land. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must "choose between settlements and peace," as Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat put it. The Israelis note that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lacks the political strength to sell any deal to his people, possibly even to his own Fatah movement. Abbas governs under the shadow of his rivals in Hamas, which emphasized its rejection of a peace process in which it has no stake by launching two deadly attacks on Israeli settlers this week. The Israelis say Hamas is a proxy of Iran, whose influence is a key obstacle to peace. And if the Obama Administration wants peace, it had better get on with pulling Iran's claws. (See pictures of Obama's trips overseas.)

Although this week's peace summit may mimic the rituals of its predecessors, its substance is quite different from the heady days of the Oslo process. None of the parties believe that the year of talks launched on Thursday, Sept. 2, will result in the implementation of a two-state solution anytime soon. The goal is a "framework agreement," which special envoy George Mitchell described as "more detailed than a declaration of principles but ... less than a full-fledged treaty." In other words, a guideline to be implemented on a better day.

Abbas is convinced, with good reason, that Netanyahu won't offer what he needs. After all, the Israeli Prime Minister refused to halt settlement construction or accept the 1967 borders as the basis for talks, and he insists Israel won't share Jerusalem. So the Palestinian leader has told his own people he's been dragged to Washington under threat of having donor funds cut to his aid-financed administration, effectively undermining any deal that results from the talks. Obviously, he's not expecting one. Abbas may be hoping simply to demonstrate, with Americans in the room, that Netanyahu won't willingly implement a viable two-state solution and that if Washington believes, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized, that a two-state peace is important to U.S. national security, it had better be prepared to pressure the Israelis. Obama's retreat on the settlement-freeze standoff suggests that may be wishful thinking. (See why Israel doesn't care about peace.)

Netanyahu, for his part, is under no political pressure at home to reach agreement; on the contrary, when he resisted the Obama Administration on the subject of settlements, his domestic political standing soared - peace with the Palestinians is simply no longer a priority for the Israeli body politic. As former Camp David negotiators Robert Malley and Hussein Agha succinctly concluded in the Washington Post on Thursday, "If Netanyahu comes back with an accord, he will be hailed as a historic leader ... If the talks collapse, his followers will thank him for standing firm, while his critics are likely in due course to blame the Palestinians. Abbas will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't."

See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.

See pictures of Israel.

Netanyahu has professed his readiness to make a historic compromise, but that may not mean the same thing to him as it does to Abbas. The Israeli Prime Minister entered office arguing it was futile to try to implement a political deal to end the conflict in the immediate future. Instead, he advocated "economic peace," focused on easing the conditions of life in the West Bank to enable economic and administrative development, creating an infrastructure for long-term Palestinian coexistence with Israeli neighbors. Even getting Netanyahu to use the words Palestinian state took some doing by the Obama Administration. He eventually complied in a speech last year but added conditions unacceptable to Abbas or any other Palestinian leader.

With Hamas in control of Gaza, the Israelis envisage regime change in the coastal strip as a precondition for progress. And given the state of Palestinian politics, Netanyahu aides argue, it's naive to imagine that Abbas could seal a deal that resolves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So the current talks are viewed not as a decisive settling of accounts with the Palestinians but an application of what Israeli leaders once called a "political horizon" to a strategy of cooperation, in order to boost Palestinian well-being and good governance in the West Bank while leaving Gaza festering to force Palestinians to reject the path of Hamas. (See pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza.)

The Bush Administration embraced this view and had Abbas spend a year in open-ended conversations with then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, aimed at achieving what was (rather unfortunately) dubbed a "shelf agreement" - a reference to its destination, as the world waited for a better day on which it would be implemented.

Although even a shelf agreement eluded Abbas and Olmert (a more centrist leader than the hawkish Netanyahu), the Obama Administration's framework-agreement concept may not be all that different. It's about creating hope on the deferred horizon while changing the status quo by increments.

Deferring Palestinian statehood will exasperate Abbas and moderate Arab regimes, because they believe its framework had been well established in previous rounds of talks. Still, a framework agreement may be the best the Obama Administration can get as long as it seeks consensus with Netanyahu. Optimists in Washington may hope that, like getting Netanyahu to say the word state, an agreed framework for the future will be perceived as progress.

The real lesson of the past two decades, however, is that the situation on the ground trumps the conversation among negotiators. And over those two decades of talks, Israel's settler population doubled and its political median moved steadily to the right, while Abbas was irrevocably weakened by the diminishing returns of his negotiation strategy. Even as the new conversation starts, Hamas is killing settlers, and the more militant settlers are no doubt planning their revenge. It may take more than framework talks to prevent the situation on the ground from turning very nasty very quickly.

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The quake, which hit 19 miles west of the southern city of Christchurch, shook a wide area with some residents saying buildings had collapsed and power was severed.

Christchurch police reported road damage in parts of the city of 400,000 people, with a series of sharp aftershocks rocking the area. Police officers cordoned off some streets where rubble was strewn about from the quake.

"The fronts of at least five buildings in the central city have collapsed and rubble is strewn across many roads," Christchurch resident Angela Morgan told The Associated Press.

"Roads have subsided where water mains have broken and a lot of people evacuated in panic from seaside areas for fear of a tsunami," she said, adding that "there is quite significant damage, really, with reports that some people were trapped in damaged houses."

Suburban dweller Mark O'Connell said his house was full of smashed glass, food tossed from shelves, with sets of drawers, TVs and computers tipped over.

"She was a beauty, we were thrown from wall to wall as we tried to escape down the stairs to get to safety," he told the AP. "It was pitch black (with the power cut) and we walked through smashed glass everywhere on the floor."

Resident Colleen Simpson said panicked residents ran into the street in their pajamas. Some buildings had collapsed, there was no power, and the mobile telephone network had failed.

"Oh my God. There is a row of shops completely demolished right in front of me," Simpson told the Stuff news website.

Another person from Christchurch, Kevin O'Hanlon, said the jolt was extremely powerful.

"I was awake to go to work and then just heard this massive noise and 'boom,' it was like the house got hit. It just started shaking. I've never felt anything like it," he told the news website.

The earthquake was 21 miles below the Earth's surface, the geological agency GNS Science said. Radio reports said items were tossed from store shelves and roof tiles cracked by the strong temblor.

The quake hit at 4:35 a.m. shaking thousands of residents awake, New Zealand's National Radio reported.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said "no destructive widespread tsunami threat existed, based on historical earthquake and tsunami data."

New Zealand sits above an area of the Earth's crust where two tectonic plates collide. The country records more than 14,000 earthquakes a year — but only about 150 are felt by residents. Fewer than 10 a year do any damage.

AfricaNews Monitoring Team Credit: Reuters 

Alan Boswell, VOA

South Sudan’s military is in the process of acquiring 10 Russian-made helicopters, according to documents seen by VOA.

The Southern Sudan government is purchasing 10 Mi-17 military transport helicopters from Kazan, a Russian company, for a total cost of $75 million, according to a March 2009 supplement to a May 2007 contract between the two parties. The contract was signed on behalf of South Sudan by the SPLA chief of staff, James Hoth Mai.

Nine of the helicopters are the “standard transport” Mi-17-V5 models, which according to Kazan’s website can carry up to 36 passengers. The other is a “VIP” Mi-172 , which can carry up to 11 in executive comfort and fashion.

The first shipment of 4 Mi-17-V5 helicopters was to land at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on August 12 aboard an Antonov AN-124 airlift jet, according to communication between the two parties early that month.

The delivery had been delayed from the May 2010 delivery date stated in the contract. The original timeframe had the third and final shipment arriving in September.

A spokesman for the Sudan Armed Forces said that the Khartoum authorities were aware of the purchase, but said that they were assured by South Sudan’s leaders that the aircraft were only for civilian use.

The spokesman for SPLA, Lieutenant General Kuol Deim Kuol, refused to comment. The spokesman for the Southern Sudan government, Minister of Information Barnaba Marial Benjamin denied the region had acquired any helicopters.

The Mi-17 is a popular export model of a Russian helicopter design first used to in its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. While not an attack helicopter like an Mi-24, the Mi-17 can be used for crude offensive purposes if outfitted with guns or bombs.

Since its inception in 1983, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – which started as a rebel movement but became South Sudan’s official military following a 2005 peace deal – has operated only as a ground force.

The purchase follows a steady stream of military purchases by both parties of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the second of two long civil wars between north and south Sudan.

The CPA was supposed to curb the re-armament of both sides by effectively giving each side a veto power over any new significant purchases by a Joint Defense Board. But according to research conducted by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, the JDB in practice has played little role scrutinizing purchases.

"This is probably a technical violation if it is being imported by the SPLA, and since it is equipment that could be used for military purposes,” said EJ Hogendoorn, Horn of Africa project director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

“But it is not a gross violation,” he said, pointing out that both sides have been actively re-arming since the CPA, with the north’s stockpile drastically dwarfing that of the south. “To my knowledge, the Sudan Armed Forces have imported at least 10 Mi-24s since 2005."

The north-south border areas in Sudan, where most of the country’s known oil reserves lie, are becoming increasingly militarized and tense as the January referendum nears, according to an ICG report released yesterday. Border demarcation has yet to take place.

Preparations for the January referendum are far behind schedule, and registration has not yet begun. Southern Sudan’s leaders have warned that any delay of the vote would constitute an acceptable breach of the peace agreement.