Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende has strongly condemned the Palestinian Authority for using Norwegian aid money to establish a women's center in Burqa named in honor of terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. Brende further noted that "Norway will not enter into any new aid agreements with the Palestinian Election Commission or UN Women in Palestine until procedures are put in place to ensure actions such as these don't happen again in the future."

Japan has pledged more than $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority, as representatives from 22 nations reiterated their support of the Palestinians' quest for their own state. The pledge was announced Saturday at the second Conference on Cooperation among East Asian Countries for Palestinian Development, held in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

Yesterday, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made a public statement accepting the call of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy for a Middle East peace conference and his offer to host this conference. In his statement, Abbas emphasized that a condition for holding the conference must be a total freeze of settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories.