* Jerusalem posters call for 3rd Temple Posters leaving out Al Aksa mosque plastered on buses with east Jerusalem routes.

* Obama resigned to nuclear Iran Bolton says Washington pressuring Israel not to strike nuke facilities.

* Israel won’t change nuclear policy Defense official: No plan to offer concessions regarding purported capability.

* Moscow Metro hit by deadly suicide bombings At least 38 people have been killed after two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on Moscow Metro trains in the morning rush hour, officials say.

* Barack Obama rallies forces on visit to Afghanistan Barack Obama has told US forces on his first visit to Afghanistan as US president that they are there to help Afghans to forge a “hard-won peace”.

* Passover Closure to Lift for Easter The IDF will impose a closure on Judea, Samaria, and Gaza during the Passover holiday, meaning that Palestinian Authority Arabs will not be allowed to enter Israel during that time.

* Arab League Summit Focused on Jerusalem, “Resistance” The Arab League concluded its 22nd summit in Libya on Sunday without any changes from its longstanding policies.

* Sensors turn skin into gadget control pad Tapping your forearm or hand with a finger could soon be the way you interact with gadgets.

* Erdogan and Merkel spar ahead of Turkey visit The integration of the three million Turkish nationals in Germany has once again emerged as a source of discord between Berlin and Ankara ahead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Turkey.

* Israeli minister says U.S. boosts Arab hardliners The Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to curb settlement activity will bolster Palestinian hardliners and hinder peace efforts.

By: Associated Newspapers Ltd

It looks like a filmmaker’s apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.

But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.

Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet’s Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.

The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater’s wall terraces.

The sheer depth of the crater – about 1.6 miles – demonstrates that Mojave has experienced little infilling or erosion.

The result offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like on Mars because it remains so fresh while most others – especially this size – have been affected by erosion, sedimentary infilling and overprinting by other geologic processes.

Such a fresh crater provides an insight into the impact process. This view, in which the vertical dimension is exaggerated three-fold compared with horizontal dimensions, shows the ponding of material backed up behind massive wall-terrace blocks of bedrock.

Hundreds of impact craters on Mars have similarly ponded features with pitted surfaces. These ‘pitted ponds’ are thought to result when material melted by the crater-causing impacts is captured behind the wall terraces.

The portion of the Mojave Crater’s north-western edge shown here spans about 2.5 miles in width halfway between the bottom and top of the image. The view is toward the north.

Mojave is one of the freshest large craters on Mars. A survey of its features indicates very few overprinting craters on them, and an analysis of that infrequency suggests the crater may be as young as about ten million years, very young for a crater of this size.

The fans and channels hint that impacts such as Mojave’s may have unleashed water or water-ice from the subsurface to flow across the surface and, perhaps, condense as rain or snow for a brief period of Martian time.

This further suggests that early climate on Mars could have been heavily influenced by the intense bombardment about 3.9billion years ago when impacts creating craters Mojave’s size and far larger were more common.

ISTANBUL — Members of Parliament from Turkey’s religious conservative governing party proposed constitutional changes on Monday that would make it harder to ban political parties and easier to prosecute military officials in civilian courts.

The proposals come after months of political turmoil and the arrest and detention of dozens of current and former military officers accused of plotting a coup against the governing Justice and Development Party in 2003.

In Turkey, the military has long been seen as the guardian of the secular order and the enforcer of a strong separation between Islam and the state, but it has been severely weakened by the coup plot case.

The proposed changes largely focus on the judiciary and the military, still the strongest pillars of the secular state establishment, which remain suspicious of the government’s conservative, religious politics.

Opponents of the proposals said they were an attempt by the party to strengthen its own hand and to deepen the encroachment of religious conservatism.

The party said the changes were meant to further democratize Turkey and bring its Constitution in line with European norms to help it pursue full European Union membership.

The Justice and Development Party has long promised to replace the 1982 Constitution, drafted under the auspices of the military after a coup in 1980. But the party had failed to win enough support, given widespread mistrust of its motivations in the secular establishment.

With the revelations about the alleged 2003 coup plot, which was never carried out, the party seemed to sense a new opening.

“Our objective with these changes is not to strengthen our government,” Cemil Cicek, the deputy prime minister, said in a televised news conference. “The aim of these constitutional amendments is to establish people’s sovereignty in every field and strengthen the rule of the people.”

One of the most important changes, and one that may gain some support, would make it harder for the country’s Constitutional Court, a supreme judicial body, to ban political parties for undermining secularism and the unity of the country. The court threatened the Justice and Development Party with such a ban in 2008, and it has banned at least 25 parties over the years to safeguard constitutional integrity.

The governing party also wants Turkey’s president to appoint most of the judges on the Constitutional Court, which would be restructured to limit its powers.

Hasan Gerceker, the head of the Supreme Appeals Court, said the package of changes contradicted the Constitution and undermined judicial independence and separation of powers.

“The suggested changes mean more than besieging the judiciary,” Mr. Gerceker said. “It’s capturing the judiciary as a whole.”

The governing party also proposed more government oversight of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, an important body within the judiciary that appoints court officials.

The board has criticized the governing party for interfering in the judiciary, particularly regarding the trial of the suspected coup plotters, who are accused of taking part in a network called Ergenekon.

As part of the continuing investigation, 10 more people were detained in six cities on Monday, joining hundreds of others, including academics, intellectuals and military officers, indicted in the Ergenekon case since 2008.

Among other constitutional changes, the reform package would allow former generals who took part in the military coup in 1980 to be tried, annulling a clause that granted immunity.

It would also allow military officers to appeal against exclusion from the army for alleged links to radical Islamic or other religious groups, and open the way for officers to be tried in civilian rather than military courts for plotting against civilian governments.

Two leading opposition parties in Parliament, the Republican People’s Party and Nationalist Movement Party, have rebuffed the reform package on the premise that it was drawn up without consultation in Parliament.

In his news conference, Mr. Cicek said the government was open to consultation before a draft of the proposals is sent to the floor of the Parliament in the next two weeks.

If the proposed constitutional changes fail to win the two-thirds majority needed to pass in Parliament, the government will hold a referendum to ratify them, Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin said.

A lopsided plurality of 42 percent of Israelis view U.S. President Barack Obama as pro-Arab, and only seven percent see him as pro-Israel, according to a new Brain Base (Maagar Mochot) poll released on Monday. Thirty-four percent of the respondents are reserving judgment, with a neutral view.

Results of the survey point to clear support for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and criticism of the Obama administration’s reaction to Israeli plans to continue building for Jews in parts of united Jerusalem that the United States and the international community refuse to recognize as being under Israeli sovereignty.

Nearly two-thirds said they support Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to continue to build in all of the capital city, while only 26 percent oppose it even though the majority also expressed the opinion that it will lead to more pressure from the United States.

A similar percentage of respondents believe that the Obama administration over-reacted to the announcement of progress in plans to build 1,600 new housing units in the Jewish neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Only five percent of the respondents said that the American criticism of the project would help the diplomatic process, while 59 percent said the criticism will hurt the peace initiative.

The survey also covered the subjects of a nuclear Iran and the issue of whether to cede the Golan Heights to Syria. A plurality of one-third expressed dissatisfaction with the American efforts to deal with the nuclear threat, and only 26 percent were satisfied. An overwhelming 82 percent of those surveyed said it is “naïve or simplistic” to think that Israel and Syria would conclude a lasting peace if Israel were to surrender the Golan Heights.

Similar sentiment was registered in the United States in a recent Israel Project poll, which showed an 8 to 1 margin of Americans saying that their government should side with Israel in the conflict with the Palestinian Authority. Those favoring support for Israel cited the Jewish State’s being the only democracy in the Middle East, and others emphasized the alliance with the United States.

Last summer, Saudi Arabia put the final bolt in its largest oil expansion project ever, opening a new field capable of pumping 1.2 million barrels a day — more than the entire production of Texas. The field, called Khurais, was part of an ambitious $60 billion program to increase the kingdom’s production to meet growing energy needs. 

It turns out the timing could not have been worse for Saudi Arabia.

Only two years ago, consumers were clamoring for more supplies, OPEC producers were straining to increase their output, and prices were rising to record levels. But now, for the first time in more than a decade, the world has more oil than it needs.

As demand slumped because of the global recession, Saudi Arabia was forced to shut about a quarter of its production. After raising its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia is now pumping about 8.5 million barrels a day, its lowest level since the early 1990s.

“2009 was painful for us as it was for everybody else,” said Khalid A. al-Falih, the president and chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s state-owned oil giant, and a company veteran who was promoted to the top post at the beginning of last year. “We experienced the same cash flow constraints that everybody did. But we adjusted quickly and, certainly, everything that was strategic to us was not touched.”

The recession also precipitated a milestone for Saudi Arabia and the global energy market. While China’s successful economic policies paved the way for a quick rebound there, the recession caused a deeper slowdown in the United States, slashing oil consumption by 10 percent from its 2005-7 peak. As a result, Saudi Arabia exported more oil to China than to the United States last year.

While exports to the United States might rebound this year, in the long run the decline in American demand and the growing importance of China represent a fundamental shift in the geopolitics of oil.

“We believe this is a long-term transition,” Mr. Falih said in a recent interview. “Demographic and economic trends are making it clear — the writing is on the wall. China is the growth market for petroleum.”

Saudi officials have said they favor prices of around $80 a barrel. Despite soft demand and high levels of inventories, oil futures in New York have averaged $75 a barrel over the last six months. On Friday, they closed at $80.68.

In the United States, some experts believe that energy-efficiency measures, as well as the government’s push for biofuels and its plans to limit carbon emissions, are putting the nation on a long-term path to lower oil consumption.

The American talk about energy independence rankles Saudi officials, who maintain that the goal is unrealistic and could end up damaging energy markets by undermining investment now, thus leading to higher prices in the long run.

Mr. Falih said he welcomed energy-efficiency measures but insisted that fossil fuels would dominate energy demand for decades.

“I was here in the 1980s after the 1970s price shocks, and I remember all the debates,” Mr. Falih said. “But ultimately the policies were reasonable. And the United States continues to search for that reasonable ground.”

Saudi officials have recognized that structural changes are taking place in the United States. A few months ago, Aramco sold its storage facilities in the Caribbean, a signal that it was abandoning the East Coast market, according to analysts. (The Saudis stopped striving to be the top foreign supplier to the United States years ago. The kingdom now trails Canada, Mexico and Venezuela for exports to the United States.)

That is not to say the Saudis are cutting ties with the United States. Aramco is expanding its Motiva refinery, in Port Arthur, Tex., which it owns with Royal Dutch Shell, to increase its capacity to 600,000 barrels a day. That will make it the largest refinery in the United States, overtaking Exxon Mobil’s Baytown refinery.

Edward L. Morse, an energy expert who heads global commodity research at Credit Suisse in New York, said the transformation was a healthy development in relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States. It also means the end of the “U.S. discount,” where Aramco sold oil to American refiners for about $1 a barrel less than to Asia.

“The Saudis don’t see the need to subsidize their oil exports to the United States anymore,” Mr. Morse said.

Last year, Saudi exports to the United States fell to 989,000 barrels a day, the lowest level in 22 years, from 1.5 million barrels a day the previous year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Meanwhile, Saudi sales to China surged above a million barrels a day last year, nearly doubling from the previous year. The kingdom now accounts for a quarter of Chinese oil imports.

Saudi Aramco recently inaugurated a huge refinery in the Fujian province, in the southeast coast of China, which is projected to receive 200,000 barrels a day of Saudi crude, and is looking at a second project in the northeast city of Qingdao.

It is also planning to build two refineries in Saudi Arabia, as joint ventures with Total and ConocoPhillips, that are primarily destined to ship products to Asia.

India is also courting Saudi attention. After a visit in March to Riyadh by India’s prime minister, Saudi Arabia outlined a goal to double its exports to India. The kingdom already accounts for 25 percent of the Indian market after its exports grew sevenfold from 2000 to 2008.

“Oil flows are shifting from West to East, and Saudi supplies that used to go to Europe and the United States are now headed for Asia,” said Jean-Jacques Mosconi, the senior vice president for strategy at Total of France.

Brad Bourland, a former State Department official who heads research at Jadwa Investment in Riyadh, said: “Saudi Arabia used to be very much an American story, but those days are gone forever. That’s just a reflection of a globalized world and the rise of Asia. They now see their relationship with China as very strategic, and very long term.”

Some energy and security experts have pointed out that the Saudi government is keen on displacing Iranian oil sales to China to persuade Beijing authorities to back tougher sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, a position that has the support of the United States.

“We know the Saudis and others have delivered the message to the Chinese that instability in the gulf is not in their interest,” Douglas C. Hengel, the deputy assistant secretary for energy, sanctions and commodities at the State Department, said last week during a conference in Houston.

But Jon B. Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the falling dependence of the United States on Saudi oil could turn into a problem for the Saudis, because the United States guarantees their security in the Persian Gulf.

“The Saudis are particularly concerned about the shape of the global market where all the growth comes from the east and all the security comes from the west,” Mr. Alterman said.

China’s oil demand is set to grow by 900,000 barrels a day in the next two years. Chinese oil consumption reached 8.5 million barrels a day last year, compared with 4.8 million in 2000. It will account for a third of the world’s total consumption growth this year.

While China is by far the fastest-growing oil market in the world, the United States is still the top consumer: despite the slump, Americans consumed 18.5 million barrels a day in 2009. That amounts to 22 barrels of oil a year for each American, compared with 2.4 barrels for each Chinese.

“To me, this is a long-term business,” said Mr. Falih during the interview.

“And that is how I look at the United States and China — as markets for commodities that will be in demand for years.”

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction.

“Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the U.S. power grid,” said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group. “Once you start interpreting every move that a country makes as hostile, it builds paranoia into the system.”

Mr. Wortzel’s presentation at the House hearing got a particularly strong reaction from Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, who called the flagging of the Wang paper “one thing I think jumps out to all of these Californians here today, or should.”

He was alluding to concerns that arose in 2001 when The Los Angeles Times reported that intrusions into the network that controlled the electrical grid were traced to someone in Guangdong Province, China. Later reports of other attacks often included allegations that the break-ins were orchestrated by the Chinese, although no proof has been produced.

In an interview last week about the Wang paper and his testimony, Mr. Wortzel said that the intention of these particular researchers almost did not matter.

“My point is that now that vulnerability is out there all over China for anybody to take advantage of,” he said.

But specialists in the field of network science, which explores the stability of networks like power grids and the Internet, said that was not the case.

“Neither the authors of this article, nor any other prior article, has had information on the identity of the power grid components represented as nodes of the network,” Reka Albert, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who has conducted similar studies, said in an e-mail interview. “Thus no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work.”

The issue of Mr. Wang’s paper aside, experts in computer security say there are genuine reasons for American officials to be wary of China, and they generally tend to dismiss disclaimers by China that it has neither the expertise nor the intention to carry out the kind of attacks that bombard American government and computer systems by the thousands every week.

The trouble is that it is so easy to mask the true source of a computer network attack that any retaliation is fraught with uncertainty. This is why a war of words, like the high-pitched one going on these past months between the United States and China, holds special peril, said John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

“What we know from network science is that dense communications across many different links and many different kinds of links can have effects that are highly unpredictable,” Mr. Arquilla said. Cyberwarfare is in some ways “analogous to the way people think about biological weapons — that once you set loose such a weapon it may be very hard to control where it goes,” he added.

Tension between China and the United States intensified earlier this year after Google threatened to withdraw from doing business in China, saying that it had evidence of Chinese involvement in a sophisticated Internet intrusion. A number of reports, including one last October by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, of which Mr. Wortzel is vice chairman, have used strong language about the worsening threat of computer attacks, particularly from China.

“A large body of both circumstantial and forensic evidence strongly indicates Chinese state involvement in such activities, whether through the direct actions of state entities or through the actions of third-party groups sponsored by the state,” that report stated.

Mr. Wang’s research subject was particularly unfortunate because of the widespread perception, particularly among American military contractors and high-technology firms, that adversaries are likely to attack critical infrastructure like the United States electric grid.

Mr. Wang said in the interview that he chose the United States grid for his study basically because it was the easiest way to go. China does not publish data on power grids, he said. The United States does and had had several major blackouts; and, as he reads English, it was the only country he could find with accessible, useful data. He said that he was an “emergency events management” expert and that he was “mainly studying when a point in a network becomes ineffective.”

“I chose the electricity system because the grid can best represent how power currents flow through a network,” he said. “I just wanted to do theoretical research.”

The paper notes the vulnerability of different types of computer networks to “intentional” attacks. The authors suggest that certain types of attacks may generate a domino-style cascading collapse of an entire network. “It is expected that our findings will be helpful for real-life networks to protect the key nodes selected effectively and avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters,” the authors wrote.

Mr. Wang’s paper cites the network science research of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Northeastern University. Dr. Barabasi has written widely on the potential vulnerability of networks to so-called engineered attacks.

“I am not well vested in conspiracy theories,” Dr. Barabasi said in an interview, “but this is a rather mainstream topic that is done for a wide range of networks, and, even in the area of power transmission, is not limited to the U.S. system — there are similar studies for power grids all over the world.”