Kerry meets with Abbas, Netanyahu

Kerry meets with Abbas, Netanyahu

AMMAN, Jordan

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Israeli and Palestinian leaders Saturday, following up on President Barack Obama’s talks with each earlier in the week, but a return to negotiations did not appear to be the main agenda item.

While making his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority as president, Obama pressed for a resumption in peace talks between the two sides, but a U.S. statement released after Kerry’s meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mention the matter at all. Instead, the four-sentence statement focused on an agreement between Israel and Turkey to normalize strained relations that Obama brokered Friday.

The White House championed the rapprochement as a major success of Obama’s trip, a view Kerry echoed.

Fighting erupts near Golan Heights

BEIRUT

Syrian regime forces routed rebels in fighting on the edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights last week, leaving at least 35 dead, activists said Saturday, as the country’s civil war reached the doorstep of the strategic plateau.

The rebel effort to overrun the Quneitra region along the cease-fire line separating Syria and Israel has heightened worries that Islamic extremists among those fighting President Bashar Assad could take over the front line with Israeli troops and gain a potential staging ground for attacks on the Jewish state.

The frontier has largely been calm in the nearly four decades since the two countries fought a war over the Golan Heights that ended with a U.N.-monitored cease-fire. But Israeli military officials have expressed concern that a rebel takeover could upset the calm maintained by Assad and his predecessor and father, the late Hafez Assad.

Fitness guru Joe Weider dies

LOS ANGELES

Joe Weider, a legendary figure in bodybuilding who helped popularize the sport worldwide and played a key role in introducing a charismatic young weightlifter named Arnold Schwarznenegger to the world, died Saturday at age 93.

Weider’s publicist, Charlotte Parker, told The Associated Press that the bodybuilder, publisher and promoter died of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

A bodybuilder with an impressive physique himself, Weider became better-known in later years as a behind-the-scenes guru to the sport.

He popularized bodybuilding and spread the message of health and fitness worldwide with such publications as Muscle & Fitness, Flex and Shape. Schwarzenegger himself is the executive editor of Muscle & Fitness and Flex.

Spring snowstorm

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

An early-spring snowstorm forced the cancellation of more than 100 flights at Denver International Airport and closed several roads Saturday as it moved eastward, dumping more than a foot of snow in some places.

Ten to 15 inches of snow had fallen by Saturday afternoon north of Interstate 70 in northwest Kansas and northeast Colorado, with another 1 to 2 inches expected in the area, said Ryan Husted, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Goodland, Kan.

Associated Press