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Hamas is ready in principle to commit to a yearlong cease-fire with Israel in exchange for a full opening of Gaza’s border crossings, Hamas officials said today, ahead of a new round of talks with Egyptian mediators in Cairo.

Egypt is trying to forge a durable truce between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas leaders, in place of the temporary and increasingly wobbly cease-fire that ended Israel’s three-week war on Hamas. But arrangements for border security remain a key sticking point.

Israel says it won’t ease a 20-month blockade of Gaza without international guarantees that Hamas will be prevented from smuggling weapons into Gaza.

As part of the truce efforts, Egypt is also trying to restart reconciliation talks between Hamas and its main rival, US-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Repeated attempts to broker a power-sharing deal have failed in the past.

Prospects remain dim, with Hamas increasingly entrenched since its violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, when it threw Abbas’ Palestinian Authority out of power in the territory.

Abbas’ government is now limited to the West Bank. Foreign ministers from nearly a dozen Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, were gathering in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, today for what was touted as a meeting to bolster Egypt’s mediation mission.

The meeting appeared aimed at showing support for Abbas and pushing Hamas to accept a truce deal and reconciliation. Key Hamas ally Syria was not invited to the session.

Saudi Arabia has offered its own proposals to help along Palestinian reconciliation efforts, said Nabil Amr, the Palestinian representative to Egypt.

Archaeologists have discovered a new pyramid under the sands of Saqqara, an ancient burial site that has yielded a string of unearthed pyramids in recent years but remains largely unexplored.

The 4,300-year-old monument most likely belonged to the queen mother of the founder of Egypt’s 6th Dynasty, and was built several hundred years after the famed Great Pyramids of Giza, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told reporters in announcing the find Tuesday.

The discovery is part of the sprawling necropolis and burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis, the capital of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, about 12 miles south of Giza.

All that remains of the pyramid is a 16-foot-tall structure that had been buried under 65 feet of sand.

“There was so much sand dumped here that no one had any idea there was something buried underneath,” said Hawass.

Hawass’ team had been excavating at the location for two years, but only determined two months ago that the structure, with sides about 72 feet long, was the base of a pyramid. The pyramid is the 118th discovered so far in Egypt, and the 12th to be found in Saqqara. Most are in ruins; only about a dozen pyramids remain intact across the country.

Archaeologists also found parts of the pyramid’s white limestone casing — believed to have once covered the entire structure — which enabled them to calculate that the complete pyramid was once 45 feet high.

“To find a new pyramid is always exciting,” said Hawass. “And this one is magical. It belonged to a queen.”

Hawass said he believes the pyramid belonged to Queen Sesheshet, who is thought to have played a significant role in establishing the 6th Dynasty and uniting two branches of the feuding royal family. Her son, Teti, ruled for about a dozen years until his likely assassination, in a sign of the turbulent times.

The pyramids of Teti’s two wives, discovered 100 years ago and in 1994 respectively, lie next to it, part of a burial complex alongside the collapsed pyramid of Teti himself.

The Egyptian team is still digging and is two weeks from entering the burial chamber inside the pyramid, where Hawass hopes they will find proof of its owner — a sarcophagus or at least an inscription of the queen, he said.

Finding more than that is unlikely, as robbers in antiquity looted the pyramid, he said, pointing to a gaping shaft on the structure’s top, a testament of the plunder.

On Tuesday, workers wearing white turbans and dust-covered robes scurried back and forth, carrying large rocks and bags heaped with sand away from the site.

Using an air brush, one worker cleaned sand from stunning hieroglyphic details on the white limestone casing, while archaeologists studied the inscriptions and students drew blueprints of the pyramid’s base.

Dieter Wildung, a leading Egyptologist and head of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, said it was common in the Old Kingdom for kings to build pyramids for their queens and mothers next to their own.

“Hawass is likely right” that the pyramid belonged to Sesheshet, said Wildung, who was not involved in the dig. “These parallel situations give a very strong argument in favor of his interpretation.”

But Joe Wegner, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who has been involved in other expeditions at Saqqara, cautioned that until “inscriptional confirmation is found, it’s still an educated guess” that the pyramid is Sesheshet’s.

Although evidence of the queen’s existence was found elsewhere in Egypt in inscriptions and a papyrus document — a medical prescription to strengthen the queen’s thinning hair — the site of her burial was not known.

The find is important because it adds to the understanding of the 6th Dynasty, which reigned from 2,322 B.C. to 2,151 B.C. It was the last dynasty of the Old Kingdom, which spanned the third millennium B.C. and whose achievements are considered the first peak of pharaonic civilization.

Saqqara is most famous for the Step Pyramid of King Djoser, built in the 27th century B.C.

Excavations have been going on here for about 150 years, uncovering a vast Old Kingdom necropolis of pyramids, tombs and funerary complexes, as well as tombs dating from the New Kingdom about 1,000 years later.

Still, only about a third of the Saqqara complex has been explored so far, with recent digging turning up a number of key finds.

The last new pyramid, found here three years ago, is thought to belong to the wife of Teti’s successor, Pepi I.

In June, Hawass’ team unveiled a “rediscovery” at Saqqara — a pyramid believed to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh whose pyramid was first discovered in 1842 but was later buried in sand.

‘Taj Mahal’, a new variety of red rose has been launched at the Amsterdam’s Horti Fair, the largest flower export in the world, by its Indian exporter, two days after its successful launch in London.S Ramasundaram, Chairman of Tanflora, on Wednesday, handed over the first bunch of ‘Taj Mahal’ roses to Th Ruys, Chairman of Moerheim BV of Holland, which developed the variety of rose exclusively for Tanflora.

Tanflora Infrastructure Park Ltd, a joint venture of Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO) and MNA & Associates, grow roses in a 200 acre farm in Hosur in Tamil Nadu, about 50 kms from Bangalore. State of Art Infrastructure for the farm is provided by the Central and Tamil Nadu governments.

The roses are grown by 25 grower-investors in each of their 5 acre green houses. The processing, packaging and marketing of the roses from all the 25 green houses is done centrally by Tanflora at its world class Central Packaging Hall at the farm.

cientists conducting research using public funds may soon get a share in the intellectual property rights (IPRs) for their discoveries and inventions.In a move to encourage research in state-funded laboratories, Government is planning to enact a legislation on the lines of the Bayh-Dole Act in the US which spurred applied research in American universities.

In India the IPRs on discoveries and inventions resulting out of research using state funds rest with the government.

The government plans to introduce the Public Funded Research and Development (Protection, Utilisation and Regulation of Intellectual Property) Bill in the Parliament session beginning Friday aims in a bid to give scientists a share in the IPRs.

Addressing a seminar here on Thursday, Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said, the Bill would be introduced in Parliament very soon.The Bill, which was on the agenda of the cabinet meeting, was withdrawn at the last minute by Sibal who felt it still needed some fine-tuning.

“I realised it needed dotting of ‘i’s and crossing of ‘t’s. We will bring it to the cabinet again very soon,” he said.

U.S. crude oil futures fell more than $1 a barrel after Wednesday’s settlement, slipping to a 13-month low as traders were concerned over weaker demand linked to a widespread economic slowdown.

That is the lowest price for U.S. crude since August 31, 2007, and less than half the July 11 record high of $147.27 a barrel.

November delivery crude hit $73.47 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Globex trading platform after settling earlier Tuesday at $74.54 a barrel, down $4.09 from Tuesday’s settlement. Tuesday, prices fell $2.56.

Hopes for wresting the White House from Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama are receding for Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

According to a Washington Post report, the latest survey, done by Research 2000, puts the Arizona senator down by 10 percentage points, 51 percent to 41 percent, a four-point shift in favor of Obama since its previous poll on September 22-23.

Polls released this week by Rasmussen and SurveyUSA also give the Democrat a 10-point edge.

Obama is leading in the polls in Republican strongholds like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio, and it is apparent that McCain’s map is shrinking fast.

“They have no place else to go. Nothing looks good now … they’ve got to find electoral votes somewhere,” said Charles Franklin, political professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-founder of pollster.com.

Thousands of protesters denounced Peruvian President Alan Garcia on Tuesday, a day after his energy minister quit in a widening scandal over steering oil concessions to favored bidders.

Members of Peru’s largest labor confederation, the CGTP, demanded Garcia shake up his cabinet and change his free-market economic model, which critics say has caused growth to surge but failed to lift people out of poverty quickly.

“Something stinks,” said Mario Huaman, leader of the CGTP. Marchers held signs calling Garcia’s party “Corrupt as ever.”

The protests, held in large cities across the country, were planned weeks before the scandal broke on Sunday night. But they reflected frustration about corruption in Garcia’s administration and fears the international financial crisis will spread to Peru.

Voters cite corruption as one of their top complaints about Garcia, whose approval rating has fallen to 19 percent, according to polling firm Ipsos Apoyo.

Ollanta Humala, the ultra-nationalist leader who nearly beat Garcia in 2006 and hopes to win the presidency in 2011, called on the president to fire his entire cabinet.

The scandal has forced out Mines and Energy Minister Juan Valdivia, along with two other high-ranking energy officials in Peru, which has a growing petroleum industry.

Alberto Quimper, a board member of state energy agency Perupetro, which organizes auctions of exploration lots and awards contracts, and Cesar Gutierrez, president of state oil and gas company Petroperu, were fired.

Late Sunday, audio tapes surfaced on an investigative television news show that included a conversation between Quimper and Romulo Leon, a prominent member of Garcia’s APRA party, in which they apparently agreed to favor Discover Petroleum, a small company from Norway, in a round of energy auctions.

Discover, which partnered with Petroperu, was awarded five blocs for energy exploration last month, which the justice ministry has suspended.

“I have no doubt there’s more, nobody should think this is an isolated case,” Fernando Rospigliosi, a former interior minister and journalist, who obtained the audio tapes, said on RPP radio.

PAYMENTS

Garcia has moved quickly to contain the damage and demanded harsh punishment for any corrupt officials.

But on Tuesday, Discover added fuel to the scandal, releasing a statement saying that it made direct payments to Leon and indirect payments to Quimper, who was subcontracted by Discover’s law firm to provide tax advice.

Between May and October, Discover reported paying $63,750 to Leon, and $60,000 to the law firm that hired Quimper.

The company did not say if it knew that Quimper, who was providing its law firm with tax advice, was also a board member at Perupetro. Still, it denied having paid bribes.

“The application process (was) completely open and transparent, and could not possibly have been influenced by any bribes,” Discover said.

“The fact that these individuals were being monitored under the suspicion of corruption already before we had any business interests in Peru, indicates that we are the ones that have been deceived,” the company said.

The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has been variously described as ‘Mr Invisible’ or ‘Slippery Eel’. Ban, who took office on January 23, 2007 retorts by saying that the UN’s work is often “unappreciated”. A 20-country survey of international opinion on the performance of world leaders, conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, showed that 83 per cent of South Koreans (his country of origin) appreciated his efforts, 70 per cent in Nigeria, 57 per cent in China, 49 per cent in Britain, 45 per cent in France and 40 per cent in India.

Ban says he believes in “results, not rhetoric”, in the Asian virtue of “quietly working on the phone, but being blunt behind closed doors”. So has the Secretary General achieved significant successes during his tenure so far? Or is the United Nations increasingly irrelevant in world affairs?

Some of the problems confronting the UN are:

• Hunger, extreme poverty, diseases (what Moon calls the “development emergency”).)

• Climate change

• Regional conflicts and authoritarianism

• Nuclear non-proliferation

• Restoring the credibility and neutrality of the United Nations

Notable success

• Toured Sudan, Chad and Libya in the wake of the Darfur crisis, persuading Sudanese president Omar Hassan al Bashir to allow an African Union-UN peacekeeping force beginning in October 2007.

• Convinced authorities in Myanmar to allow the Yangon international airport to be used for aid distribution by international agencies, in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.

• Calls climate change the “defining challenge of our age”. Organised a successful meet in September 2007, will chair a global conference on climate change in Copenhagen next year.

• Set up a high level task force for the UN’s food price agenda with measures that can cost up to $15 billion. Talked of revitalising agriculture to tackle food prices at a UN sponsored summit in Rome in June 2008. Food production would have to rise by 50 per cent by 2030 to meet demand, he said.

• Asked donors to support trust funds established to help poor countries deal with natural disaster.

• On Iraq, Ban has talked of promoting greater regional dialogue. He included the possibility of engaging Syria and Iran, who may otherwise act as spoilers.

• Bureaucratic reforms within the UN: split peacekeeping operations into two departments–operations and arms. In the face of opposition from a well-entrenched bureaucracy, made all positions as five-year appointments, with annual performance review; all financial disclosures to be made public. Enlarging the 15-member Security Council also on his agenda.

Setbacks

• Widely regarded as a US lackey, accused of providing political cover to American policies in West Asia. Has tried to nudge the US on issues such as increased US fund for UN peacekeeping, Sudan and climate change. Caught between the conflicting interests of Western nations (also major funders) and the G-77, the bloc of developing countries.

• Failure to speak out against human rights abuses, including the failure to condemn Saddam Hussein’s execution in Iraq. His stress on an increased UN role in Iraq at a time of increased violence, has come in for criticism in various quarters.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday that the government is ready to compromise to reach a security accord with the United States because Iraq still needs American troops despite the drop in violence.

In an interview with The Associated Press, al-Maliki said neither he nor Iraq’s parliament will accept any pact that fails to serve the country’s national interests. A poorly constructed plan would provoke so much discord in Iraq that it could threaten his government’s survival, he said.

Al-Maliki said, however, that he is firmly committed to reaching an accord that would allow U.S. troops to remain in the country beyond next year.

“We regard negotiating and reaching such an agreement as a national endeavor, a national mission, a historic one. It is a very important agreement that involves the stability and the security of the country and the existence of foreign troops. It has a historic dimension,” al-Maliki said.

The Iraqi prime minister spoke at length about the difficulty he faces in trying to negotiate the accord that would set the terms for the U.S. presence in Iraq for years to come. Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr oppose the accord, arguing U.S. forces should leave Iraq as soon as possible. Neighboring Iran also has been speaking out vociferously against a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq.

“Pressures are coming from east and west and north and south, but we are determined to rise above all these difficulties and pressures because we want this agreement to be passed,” al-Maliki said, “and we will go ahead despite all that is being said.”

The prime minister also noted with gratitude the high cost paid by American taxpayers, the U.S. military and the forces of other coalition members to secure Iraq’s freedom over the past five years.

“We appreciate and we respect their sacrifices,” he said of the U.S. troops killed, adding that their deaths would act as a bridge between the two countries.

Answering questions in his office in Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone, in an ornate room once used by Saddam Hussein’s son Odai, al-Maliki said a compromise was near on the thorny issue of legal jurisdiction over U.S. forces. He said it would involve an offer of limited immunity for American forces.

“We have proposed that the legal jurisdiction would be … with the Americans … when the troops are performing military operations,” he explained.

“When they are not performing a military operation, they are outside their camps, the legal jurisdiction would be in the hands of the Iraqi judiciary.”

He added: “I think we are getting near to a compromise on this issue. I think the atmosphere is positive and once we manage to find a solution for this issue, other issues will be easy to deal with.”

He said the deal has been slowed by electoral politics in the United States and also in Iraq, where provincial elections are due to take place by Jan. 31.

“Unfortunately, the negotiations were held in an atmosphere that is exhausted with the election debate, both in America and also to a certain extent here. You know, sometimes the election debate and the electoral campaigns can sometimes move away from objectivity,” he said.

If the talks fail, or if parliament eventually refused to approve the accord, the U.S. fallback likely would be to seek a resolution at the U.N. Security Council authorizing a renewal of the mandate for coalition troops to operate in Iraq. The current U.N. mandate expires Dec. 31.

But al-Maliki said his government would oppose another U.N. resolution because it would infringe on Iraqi sovereignty.

He also said new tensions between Russia and the United States over last month’s Russia-Georgia war would complicate any U.S. attempt to get Security Council approval for an extended mandate.

“If we don’t reach an agreement by the 1st of January 2009, the (U.S.) troops will have to remain in their bases,” al-Maliki said, “and then there should be a plan for a quick withdrawal.

“This would not be in the interests of Iraq nor in the interests of the United States. Our need for coalition forces is decreasing — but it still exists,” he said.

Al-Maliki said Americans may not be fully aware of the accomplishments brought about by the U.S. intervention in Iraq.

He listed those as — “Establishing a national government following a dictatorship and spreading freedoms inside Iraq after decades of oppression; establishing a constitutional structure inside the country; creating a friendly people toward the United States — the people of Iraq; and probably the most important achievement was to defeat the extremists from al-Qaida and the militias, people who threaten humanity in general. And America has seen the results of what happens when those people are not confronted.”

“Unfortunately Iraq cannot solve America’s economic problems, but what Iraq can do is take up more responsibility security-wise here inside Iraq,” al-Maliki said.

“And I have told the Americans repeatedly that we are ready to take up responsibility here in Iraq so there are less losses and a decreased number of American lives lost,” he said.

Office emails are more loaded with lies than traditional written communications like pen and paper, new research suggests. Previous research has supported this notion, also finding that phone calls are even more packed with prevarication.

A pair of new studies indicates email in the workplace is more deceptive than old fashioned writing, and that people feel quite justified in their distortions.

“There is a growing concern in the workplace over email communications, and it comes down to trust,” said Liuba Belkin, co-author of the studies and an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University. “You’re not afforded the luxury of seeing nonverbal and behavioral cues over email. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception.”

In one study, the researchers gave 48 full-time MBA students $89 to divide between themselves and another fictional party, who only knew the dollar amount fell somewhere between $5 and $100. There was one pre-condition: the other party had to accept whatever offer was made to them. Using either email or pen-and-paper communications, the MBA students reported the size of the pot - truthful or not - and how much the other party would get.

Lying was rampant in all situations. But students using email lied about the amount of money to be divided more than 92 percent of the time, while less then 64 percent lied when writing by hand.

A second study of 69 full-time MBA students found that the more familiar emailers are with each other, the less deceptive they tend to be. They still lied, however.

The research, presented recently at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, adds to mounting evidence of emailing’s pitfalls. Among them: harsher words than we wrote in the old days.

“These findings are consistent with our other work that shows that email communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations, all as opposed to pen-and-paper systems,” said co-author Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University. “People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing.”

Email may not be the worst way to go, however.

A small study in 2004 by Jeff Hancock of Cornell University, involving 30 university students who were asked to keep a communications journal for a week, found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The participants fessed up to the researchers for the sake of the study. They lied in 14 percent of emails, 21 percent of instant messages, 27 percent of face-to-face interactions and 37 percent of phone calls.

Researchers generally believe that lies are related to self-esteem. We want to look good.

But the workplace seems to be a den of dishonesty. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2006 found that people are willing to lie to those they know, and in fact we are “more likely to muddle the truth with our coworkers than with perfect strangers.”

“We want to both look good when we are in the company of others (especially people we care about), and we want to protect our self-worth,” said the leader of that study, Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta.

Interestingly, fudging the facts is a more serious problem at non-profits, according to David Shulman, author of “From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace” (ILR Press, 2006). The reason, Shulman figures, is that nonprofits tend to struggle more than for-profit corporations, “which may lead to deception to survive and serve a mission.”

Earlier this year, Shulman summarized his findings in an article for the International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law. “Small size, meager resources, and greater discretion for managers may encourage greater deception” in non-profits, he writes. “An exacerbating factor is that nonprofits are moral entrepreneurs, so deceptions can often be morally rationalized.”