The Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, met for the first day of direct talks in Washington today and agreed that a peace deal could be achieved within a year.

George Mitchell, the White House envoy who joined the negotiations, said the two leaders decided to begin putting together a framework agreement on all major issues - such as borders, Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and security - that will "establish the fundamental compromises necessary" to flesh out a comprehensive peace deal.

Mitchell said Netanyahu and Abbas agreed to meet again in a fortnight in the Middle East and every two weeks after that. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and Mitchell will attend the first of those meetings on 14 September.

Hurricane Earl, some 300 miles south of North Carolina's Cape Hatteras, has now prompted tropical-storm or hurricane warnings from the Tar Heel State's coast to the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.

Coastal New England from Westport, Mass., to Hull, a town at the end of a peninsula forming part of Boston Harbor, is the latest swath of coastline to come under a hurricane warning.

From the North Carolina-Virgina border up to Westport, the entire coastline is under a tropical storm warning. The Delmarva Peninsula is under a hurricane watch as well.

"We've talked about people needing to be prepared and getting their plans ready. We're past that," says Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "This is a day of action." People need "to be ready to heed any additional evacuation orders as this storm continues to track to the north," he says.

PHOENIX -- An Arizona sheriff has been sued by the U.S. Justice Department for refusing to cooperate with a civil-rights probe into police practices and jail operations.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, is disappointing given that he and his office were cooperating on the federal probe. "I thought we were really close to getting this resolved," the sheriff said.

Arpaio restated his confidence that Maricopa County Sheriff's deputies do not target Hispanic citizens because of their race, and said if the Justice Department had any evidence of racial profiling, they wouldn't be suing him to get records to prove that deputies profile.

Ten election campaign workers have been killed in an air strike by Nato-led forces in Afghanistan, officials say.

The governor of the northern province of Takhar, Abduljabar Taqwa, told the BBC that two people were also wounded in the attack in the Rostaq district.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the incident, saying that "pro-democracy people should be distinguished from those who fight against democracy".

Violent protests over high food prices are continuing in Mozambique, with at least seven people killed since demonstrations began on Wednesday.

Shops were looted, cars set on fire and roads barricaded on Thursday, while troops attempted to clean up streets and restore order in Maputo, the impoverished nation's capital.

Witnesses said police opened fire on protesters in a poor suburb of the city, but there were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries.

According to local television, one person drowned on Thursday after falling in a pond while escaping police.

Russia announced a 12-month extension of its grain export ban on Thursday, raising fears about a return to the food shortages and riots of 2007-08 which spread through developing countries dependent on imports.

The announcement by Vladimir Putin came as the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation called an emergency meeting to discuss the wheat shortage, and riots in Mozambique left seven dead.

The unrest in Maputo, in which 280 people were also injured, followed the government's decision to raise bread prices by 30 per cent. Police opened fire on demonstrators after thousands turned out to protest against the price hikes, burning tyres and looting food warehouses.

Although agricultural officials and traders insist that wheat and other crop supplies are more abundant than in 2007-08, officials fear the deadly Mozambique riots could be replicated.

Democratic campaign ad against Vitter (R-LA), including reenactment of his crime

A class-action lawsuit filed in Superior Court accuses Toronto and Peel police of a litany of wrongdoings related to their conduct during the June G20 summit.

The statement of claim names the Toronto Police Services Board, the Attorney-General of Canada and the Regional Municipality of Peel Police Services Board as co-defendants.

Plaintiffs Miranda McQuade and Mike Barber are acting as the public face for hundreds of citizens arrested or detained by authorities during summit protests.

"The conduct of the defendants... fell fall short of both common law and constitutional norms and effectively eroded the fundamental freedoms and civil liberties enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," the 41-page claim alleges.

Colombia Reports: Authorities on Thursday raised the number of police killed in an alleged FARC attack in the southern Caqueta department to fourteen. Initially, departmental authorities had said five policemen were killed on a Wednesday evening patrol when a roadside bomb exploded.

Colombia Reports: More than 10% of Colombia's population is displaced, Constitutional Court magistrate Luis Ernesto Vargas said Thursday. The court official blames the massive displacement on the country's armed conflict, but also on mega projects that are executed without consulting the local population, leaving them without access to their land. The displacement hits the indigenous and afrocolombian peoples hardest, said Vargas. 16.6% of Colombia's displaced is afrocolombian and 6.5% is indigenous.

RIO DE JANEIRO - The government of the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso has announced the discovery of a huge deposit with as much as 11 billion tons of iron ore with an Fe grade of 41 percent, as well as an estimated 428 million tons of phosphate rock. The deposit holds three times the volume of the Carajas iron ore mine, also located in Brazil and one of the largest in the world, although the ore grade of the latter is higher, Gov. Silval Barbosa told a press conference.

MANAGUA - Six people have died since the start of the week in the heavy rains in Nicaragua, raising the death toll from the torrential rains this year to 40, emergency management officials said. "The rains have mainly affected rural areas in the northern and central parts of the country, where there are streams and rivers that have been crossed without caution by adults," emergency management chief Gen. Mario Perezcassar told Efe.

IKN News Round-up

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

(h/t crooksandliars.com)