Input: U.S.-Led Coalition Airstrike in Syria Killed Civilians, Opposition Says
An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition killed about 25 civilians late Thursday in an Islamic State-held town in northern Syria, Syrian opposition and activist monitoring groups said.

The attack on a market in the village of Ghandora came less than two weeks after opposition and monitoring groups blamed coalition strikes for the deaths of dozens of people, possibly more than 100, in Tokhar, another village in the region.
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It's about: An airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition killed about 25 civilians late Thursday in an Islamic State-held town in northern Syria, according to the Syrian opposition and activist monitoring groups.


Input: Rice Hints at U.S. Peace Push on Mideast
ASWAN, Egypt, Sunday, March 25  In making her fourth trip to the Middle East in four months to try to breathe life into dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has opened the door to the possibility that the United States might offer its own proposals to bridge the divide on some of the entrenched issues that have bedeviled the region for decades.

Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse  Getty Images

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Aswan, Egypt, Saturday.

“I don’t rule out at some point that might be a useful thing to do,” Ms. Rice told reporters in Washington before departing for Aswan, Egypt, where she met with Sunni Arab allies on Saturday before her journey to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Such an initiative would be proof of a profound policy change for the Bush administration, which has steadfastly refrained from trying to impose any American-made solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Saturday, Ms. Rice was also looking for an even more profound shift from some of the United States’ Arab allies. She met here with her counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, during an afternoon and evening of sessions at the grand Cataract Hotel, made famous in Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile.” She prodded the group, particularly Saudi Arabia, to reach out to Israel with an offer of eventually normalizing relations between Israelis and Saudis on the horizon.

While trying to get the Saudis to talk to the Israelis was one of the tacit purposes of her trip, American officials have taken pains not to be seen in public as pressuring the Saudi monarchy. “The secretary was not preaching to them about how they ought to do their business,” a senior administration official said.

But with Israelis increasingly disenchanted after a Saudi-brokered deal last month in which the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to form a national unity government with the Islamist militant group Hamas, Ms. Rice is pressing Arab states to hold out normalized relations to give Israelis something to look forward to.

She would like to see the Arab countries augment a 2002 Saudi peace proposal when the Arab League holds its meeting in Riyadh at the end of the month. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, who is conducting his own tour of the Middle East, will also be there.

American officials have largely given up their hope that the Arabs might actually change the initiative to include things more palatable to Israel  like, for instance, signaling a willingness to at least discuss ways to settle the issue of Palestinian refugees who left, or were forced to leave, their homes in Israel.

But Ms. Rice may be able to get some sort of formal or informal mechanism going that could give Israelis hope of eventually normalizing relations with the Arab world, American officials said. “It would be a very good thing if at some point the Arab initiative provided a basis for discussion,” Ms. Rice said.

That’s a tall order even in the best of circumstances  most Arab countries don’t talk to Israel. And on Saturday, the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, signaled that there was no intention to change the league’s peace initiative.

“We fail to understand why we should modify such a peace offer and make it less objective and less positive,” Reuters quoted him as saying at a news conference in Cairo with Mr. Ban.

But there’s a growing chorus in Washington that after the Saudi-brokered agreement that formed the Palestinian national unity government, the time has come for the Arab countries to try to push an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative forward.

“We’re at a critical juncture right now,” said David Makovsky, a Middle East expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The Arab states can reach out to the Israeli center, and to Olmert,” referring to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, who Mr. Makovsky pointed out is politically weakened right now within his country. “But if they don’t, they shouldn’t be surprised if Israel moves rightward,” which could complicate the peace process, he added.

The sense of urgency has built within the Bush administration as well. Several State Department officials say there is now internal acknowledgment that the previous hands-off policy had caused prospects for peace to deteriorate. “This is a place where if you leave things alone, they don’t just stagnate,” one administration official said. “They get worse.”

With the Iraq war having sharply eroded support for the United States in the Arab world, many administration officials now say that perhaps the only antidote would be to be seen as actively pushing for a Mideast peace deal and the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

With such factors in mind, Ms. Rice has pressed ahead with her efforts despite the deal brokered by Saudi Arabia for Mr. Abbas to form a unity government with Hamas. That move once would have grounded all hopes for peace talks involving the Bush administration, because it views Hamas as a terrorist group.

Ms. Rice is also prodding Mr. Olmert to start peace negotiations with Mr. Abbas, and to negotiate with him separately from Hamas.

“She really has tied her personal credibility to this issue in a way that most normal political observers would say, ‘Is she nuts?’ ” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under President Bush and the previous two presidents.

But, Mr. Miller added, “Unless you’re in the middle of the mix, nothing gets done.”
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It's about: In making her fourth trip to the region in four months, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opened the door to a possibility that the Bush administration has avoided.


Input: Join Margaret Atwood on November 11 for a discussion of her works
For the past several weeks, MashableReads has been reading Margaret Atwood's collection of short stories from Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. We've been discussing the stories on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads, and now, we're going to wrap up our discussion with a live Google Hangout with Atwood herself.

Join us Nov. 11 at 3:50 p.m. ET for a discussion with Atwood about her haunting and beautiful Stone Mattress collection, as well as a larger discussion of fiction, sci-fi and fantasy writing. Last month, we hosted a Twitter fiction contest inspired by Atwood's dark storytelling. We'll be joined by some of the winners of our contest, as well as members of the online MashableReads community, during the Hangout.

If you have a question for Atwood about Stone Mattress or any of her other works, tweet it at us using #MashReads, or leave a question in the Hangout using the Q&A app. If you can't join us live, watch the Hangout on YouTube later to see if Atwood answered your question.

Haven't had a chance to pick up Stone Mattress yet? Check out the collection's first story, "Alphinland," available exclusively from Mashable for a limited time:

Want more great book recommendations from Mashable? Join MashableReads, Mashable's social book club. You'll have the chance to win free copies of new novels, and participate in conversations with various authors.

BONUS: Authors in Conversation with MashableReads
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It's about:
Margaret Atwood will be answering reader questions during a live MashableReads Google Hangout on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 3:50 pm ET.