News stories by Pierre Klochendler, page 9

Israel's prison authority has begun processing the first batch of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners to be swapped on Tuesday for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who's been held in captivity by Hamas-affiliated groups for more than five years.

'On Saturday, we as a nation atoned for our sins. I as a Jew feel ashamed of myself. I'm asking for forgiveness,' declared Ron Hulday, mayor of this mixed city, immediately at the closing of the Day of Atonement.

Days after his half-hearted conciliatory U.N. appearance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already approved the construction of 1,100 flats in occupied East Jerusalem. Yet on Sunday, he threw his support behind the new Mideast Quartet's peace plan with the Palestinians.

'Welcome to our 'Palestine State Parliament'!' Nidal Bazbaz calls out to a friend who's passing by in between an assembly of older and younger Palestinians. They're seated on plastic chairs, lined up against opposite walls, in an alleyway of the walled Old City.

'The people demand social justice!' Across the country's major cities, over 300,000 demonstrators, five percent of Israel's Jewish population, chanted the rallying call for the third consecutive Saturday.

'It wasn't easy to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense,' reminisces marine biologist Samuel Appelbaum, peering through the opaque water where thousands of barramundi are being harvested.

For the first time in over 20 years, thousands of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists marched peacefully together on Friday to support the Palestinian drive for statehood expected to be endorsed at the UN General Assembly in September.

'One step at a time,' this fairy tale says. 'Wonders and miracles, these shoes brought me back my life!' For Miriam Gilebsky, walking is no simple thing, it’s an achievement greater than life, like walking on the moon, perhaps. One small step for health is one giant leap when you suffered a stroke.

The besieger is besieged, such is the forlorn fact emanating from the order by Greece to block the ships docked at its ports from setting sail to the Palestinian strip of land, and that fact seems to have sealed the Flotilla's fate.

Amidst last-minute preparations for a new Peace Flotilla that will try this week to break Israel's maritime blockade on Gaza, signs of a tentative thawing in relations between Israel and Turkey following a two-year crisis are becoming more and more apparent.