The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent the country's political landscape into turmoil when he announced on Wednesday that he was stepping down after his party's leadership elections on Sept 17. Mr Olmert stepped down in the face of a long-running corruption investigation and it remains to be seen what his departure will mean for the peace process with the Palestinians. The New York Times reported: "The televised announcement injected new uncertainty into Israeli politics and the Middle East peace effort, coming just as Mr. Olmert has been intensifying negotiations with the Palestinian Authority as well as Syria. "It also raises questions about the political legacies of both President Bush and Mr Olmert, who have hoped to burnish their reputations by achieving breakthroughs in Middle East peace talks before leaving office. "Mr Olmert's domestic credibility has sunk so low that it is unclear whether he still has the legitimacy or the political traction to make historic concessions to Arab adversaries at all. "His political weakness may also undermine his ability to work in partnership with the Americans in pursuit of Middle East peace." But in an editorial, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the public had become tired of politicians who live on the generosity of others. It said: " Behavior that used to be acceptable as long as a court did not rule otherwise is now unacceptable from the start. Olmert is not the first public figure who took advantage of his public office to fund his hedonism. He is not the first to have received gifts or to fly first class at someone else's expense - whether a non-governmental organisation or a body for which he volunteered. He is not the first alleged to have stayed in a suite that no civil servant can pay for on his own, and not the first to have allegedly arranged for himself, family and friends unusual benefits, loans on terms reserved for grants, and discounts at hotels and on homes - everything that power and connections can get. "He is not the first, but he may be the last. Anyone who runs for any public office from now on, however senior the position, will have to take into account the new norms." After Mr Olmert's decision to step down, attention switched to the future make-up of the Israeli government. Front runners for the top post in Mr Olmert's Kadima party include the foreign minister Tipzi Livni but it has been predicted that early elections would favour Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing leader of the opposition. As early as Thursday, Mr Netanyahu called for snap elections. The BBC reported: "Mr Netanyahu told public radio: 'This government has finished its mission, irrespective of who will head Kadima. "'Everyone in this government is responsible for a string of failures. We must let the people decide through new elections.'"
Bombings in Ahmedabad and Bangalore prompted fears that India is under attack from a home-grown terrorist network after the "Indian Mujahideen" claimed responsibility for Saturday's serial blasts. "The air thick with the stench of death and explosives - this was Ahmedabad on Saturday evening after the serial blasts," The Times of India reported. "Some of the most gory sights were played out on the city streets as people tried to come to terms with the worst terror attack in Gujarat's history. "Ironically, civil hospital, where wounds should have been healed, was one of the worst hit. At least eight bodies lay strewn here. "'The terrorists seem to have worked with deadly precision. The terror planners had actually tried to figure out how much time it would take for the injured to reach civil hospital - the biggest and the busiest government-run hospital in the city,' said senior police officials." Time magazine said: "Several TV news stations received an e-mail five minutes before the first blasts in Ahmedabad. The message reportedly had the Indian Mujahideen proclaiming the fact that they were based within the country, claimed sole responsibility for the attacks and asked other organisations like Lashkar-e-Toiba not to take credit. The email purportedly cited a list of grievances against India's Hindu majority, and hinted at more attacks to come. The same group had claimed responsibility for blasts that had killed 63 people in the northwestern city of Jaipur in May this year, as well as serial blasts in the northern cities of Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow in which 13 people were killed in November 2007. "While the credibility of the e-mail has yet to be established, the recent bombings have forced the Indian authorities to face some very uncomfortable facts. First, terrorist groups now have the wherewithal to strike at will and inflict significant damage. The targeting of Bangalore, one of the pivots of India's nascent economy, shows an ability to strategise. Secondly, recent efforts to spruce up intelligence gathering and policing have been entirely inadequate. Despite the security threats festering across the country - there have been 11 major Islamist bombings in the last three years, and over a dozen in the insurgency-ridden northeast this year alone - India's police stand at just 126 officers per 100,000 people. The United Nations norm is 222. The Intelligence Bureau, responsible for internal intelligence gathering, has a sum total of 3,500 field operatives - for a country of 1.1 billion. Finally, the security establishment cannot go on blaming a 'foreign hand' for these attacks. The profusion of such attacks within a short time-frame cannot have been possible without local recruits. India must now face up to a brood of home-grown Islamist terrorists feeding off popular and growing Muslim resentment against the purported injustices and atrocities of the Hindu majority. Indeed, the last three terror attacks have been in states ruled by the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - the Hindu right-wing party. The Christian Science Monitor reported: "Ahmedabad, the main city in Gujarat, is especially vulnerable to communal tensions. In 2002, a train fire that killed members of a Hindu nationalist group sparked Hindu-Muslim riots in which over 2,000 people, most of them Muslim, died. "'Await five minutes for the revenge of Gujarat,' read an e-mail sent to television stations, purportedly from the Indian Mujahideen, moments before Saturday's explosions. "But analysts say that stoking communal tensions is not the sole objective of recent attacks. 'These people want to hurt the country in any way possible,' says Ajay Sahni, a terrorism expert at the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi. 'Causing communal tensions is a secondary objective to that. If I wanted to whip up communal riots I would ensure that only Hindus were killed whereas these attacks are occurring in areas with mixed populations.' Indeed, Saturday's attacks occurred in Ahmedabad's old city, which houses many Muslims."
