As the unrest rocked Jerusalem, US Middle East envoy George Mitchell delayed a visit to the region amid the worst diplomatic spat in decades between Israel and key ally the United States, which was struggling to revive peace talks.

Police fired rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas at Palestinian protesters who hurled stones and set up barricades of dumpsters and burning tyres in several neighbourhoods.

Twenty-one injured Palestinians were hospitalised and dozens more were treated on the spot, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said.

One policeman suffered a pistol shot to the hand in an Arab neighbourhood of east Jerusalem, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, adding that the unknown gunman got away.

Four other policeman were briefly taken to hospital and another 10 treated on site after being hit by rocks.

Sixty Palestinians were arrested.

Also Tuesday, stones were thrown at a bus in the largely Arab neighbourhood of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, said Rosenfeld, the first reports of unrest in other Israeli cities. The bus was damaged, but there were no injuries.

The clashes erupted across east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed in a move not recognised by the international community.

As the rioting flared, Hamas deputy politburo chief Mussa Abu Marzuk called for another popular Palestinian uprising.

"The intifada must enjoy the participation of all of Palestinian society," he told Al-Jazeera television. "Every Palestinian should rise up ... against the forces of the (Israeli) occupation."

In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip thousands of people took to the streets, chanting: "With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice for you, Jerusalem."

The Palestinians have launched two intifadas against Israeli rule in the occupied territories, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000, but Hamas's calls for a new uprising in recent years have been largely ignored.

Facts on the ground: Israel's Jewish settlements

Israeli police chief Dudi Cohen told reporters he did not see signs of a new uprising: "We are seeing signs of disorderly conduct, but that's all."

Palestinians were already seething over Israeli plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers in east Jerusalem.

Last week's announcement of the project also incensed Washington, and Mitchell postponed a visit to the region that was to start on Tuesday. That trip will not take place before the Middle East Quartet meets in Moscow on Thursday.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said he would not travel to Moscow because of the tension in Jerusalem.

But even as Mitchell stayed away, the mutual anger appeared to ease slightly with warmer words being uttered on both sides.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington remained committed to reviving peace talks, telling reporters there was "too much at stake" for Palestinians and Israelis to abandon them.

"Our goal now is to make sure that we have the full commitment from both our Israeli and the Palestinian partners to this effort," she said.

Israeli-Palestinian tensions undermine US interests: US general

Clinton and the White House reaffirmed the US commitment to Israel's security and to ties with Israel.

"It does not break the unbreakable bond that we have with the Israeli government and the Israeli people on their security," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a statement: "The State of Israel appreciates and cherishes the warm words from Secretary of State Clinton on the deep ties between the US and Israel and the US commitment to Israel's security."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon called for restraint from both Israel and the Palestinians, and reiterated that Jerusalem's final status should be decided by negotiations.

Earlier this month, the Palestinians reluctantly agreed to indirect talks with Israel after a 14-month break, but the outlook for a swift resumption of the peace process now looks bleak after the new settlements announcement.

The reopening of the twice-destroyed Hurva synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem's walled Old City on Monday further fuelled tensions.

Many Palestinians view Israeli projects near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound -- Islam's third holiest site -- as an assault on its tense status quo or a prelude to the building of a third Jewish temple there.

Jews call the compound Temple Mount and consider it their holiest site because the second Temple stood there before the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD.

During a heated exchange with Republican congressmen, Holder predicted that "we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden" rather than to the US public enemy number one in captivity.

"Let's deal with reality," the attorney general added. Bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom."

Holder reacted angrily to Republican critics who say the attorney general's proposal to try terror suspects in US federal civilian courts would put Americans at risk.

"They have the same rights that a Charles Manson would have, any other kind of mass murderer," he told a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing.

"The notion that a defendant in an Article III (civilian) court is somehow being treated in an inappropriate, special way -- that he's being coddled, is anything but the truth... These defendants charged with murder are treated just like any other murder defendant would be."

Republican Representative John Culberson said Holder's analogy to Manson, a convicted killer, showed President Barack Obama's administration has a profound disconnect with an American public that wants the terror suspects to be tried as war criminals and not as criminal defendants.

"My constituents and I just have a deep-seeded and profound philosophical difference with the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, the leadership of this Congress," the Texas Republican said.

"This is war, and in time of war, we as a nation have never given constitutional rights to foreign nationals, enemy soldiers, certainly captured overseas."

The hearing came as the Obama administration's plans to try the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his alleged co-conspirators on trial in New York have been put on hold.

Mounting opposition from local politicians, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has led the White House to reconsider, and it is now looking at trying the men in a military tribunal.

Holder said a decision was weeks and not months away.

Democratic Representative Chaka Fattah, meanwhile, complained that politicians were too "cowardly" to hold a civilian trial in New York, just steps away from where the World Trade Center once stood.

"It doesn't befit a great nation to hesitate or equivocate on the question of following our own laws and the impulse to justice," he said.

"I just want it to pass, and I think it will," he told reporters during a rare visit to the US Capitol for closed-door talks with Senate Democrats, billed as focused on climate change and job creation.

As enough Democrats wavered to put the fate of the historic legislation's in doubt, Clinton stressed "it doesn't have to be perfect" and predicted lawmakers would have to keep working to fine-tune the system.

"It takes a long time to get these things done," said the former president, who told reporters he would be "one happy fella" when the legislation passed but that his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, might be even happier.

"Maybe Hillary'll be the happiest person in America, I'll be the second happiest person. Even more than President Obama, even more than (White House chief of staff) Rahm (Emanuel)" and other top aides, he said.

During his administration, Hillary Clinton took the lead in crafting a sweeping health care overhaul, only to watch it crumble in 1994 under attacks from Republicans and insurers and doubts from centrist Democrats.

In a country where film and television attract some of the largest audiences across the Arab world, the tycoon's foray into the Middle East is widely seen in cultural circles as a ruse to benefit Israel.

Murdoch's News Corp last month acquired a 9.09-percent holding in the Rotana Group of Saudi royal and business tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with an 18-month option to double the stake.

Rotana is one of the largest film producers in Egypt and also owns the rights to hundreds of Egyptian motion pictures.

In Egypt, which signed a 1979 peace treaty with Israel but has resisted a warming of cultural ties, there has been wide suspicion that the tie-up with Rotana is part of a Murdoch scheme to thaw frosty Arab views of Israel.

"Murdoch will enter every Arab home to impose normalisation" of ties with Israel, said Egyptian film critic Ola al-Shafei.

The partnership amounts to "a defeat for the Arab film and art heritage," she added.

Scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha wrote that Murdoch's stake in Rotana was a "Trojan horse" designed to stealthily penetrate Arab culture.

"The important thing is not the share sold by Alwaleed, but a person who hands over nine percent can also sell off the rest of the company," said novelist Ezzat Qamhawi.

"We are now facing the reality of the sale of Arab films and music to an investor whose media empire is one of the causes of the erroneous image of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West," he added.

Murdoch's leading US news outlets like the strident Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and his British holdings such as the Times, Sky TV and the Sun, are often accused of an anti-Arab, pro-Israel bias.

Egypt's state-owned film company has already threatened to stop working with Rotana, whose bouquet of free-to-air satellite channels target an Arab audience across the Middle East that is equally opposed to Murdoch's politics.

"The Arabs see Murdoch as a person who does not respect them, their faith, or heritage," wrote Palestinian journalist and poet, Iqbal Tamimi.

"The majority say that he is gambling with his money if he thinks that the Arabs will forget his far right-wing political news machine, or his pro-Israeli stands," she added.

Murdoch has made no bones about his unabashed support of Israel for decades, and has received a number of awards from Jewish groups amid debate over his own Jewish roots.

On the other hand, Alwaleed, known in his country as a progressive, is a strong supporter of Arab causes -- though not stridently vocal against Israel.

He said last month that he hoped the partnership could help moderate the widely-perceived anti-Arab bias of some of News Corp's most strident outlets, such as Fox News.

"It's not only Fox that in general is against the Arab world. It's an American syndrome," he said at a news conference in Riyadh when the deal was announced.

"We will always do our best to lower that tone," he said.

Some in America regard Alwaleed as the public face of Saudi Arabia's hardline brand of Islam.

Outside of financial markets where his Kingdom Holdings is known as the biggest individual shareholder of Citigroup, Alwaleed is best known for his rejected offer of 10 million dollars to New York City for disaster relief after the September 11 attacks.

At the time Murdoch's news outlets lambasted the Saudi prince, and Fox called his offer "an egregious, outrageous, unfair offence" because the money came with a letter asking Americans to consider how US Middle East policy might be linked to the attacks.

But Fox has since run in trouble with its supporters for allegedly bending to pressure from Alwaleed.

When in 2005 Alwaleed was reported as saying he had influenced how Fox News depicted rioting in heavily Muslim suburbs in France, the conservative Accuracy in Media group called for an investigation.

After Alwaleed, who owns a seven-percent stake in News Corp, gave an interview to Fox News this January conservatives blasted the network for its alleged kid-glove treatment.

Rotana's Khalijia channel has begun airing the controversial Turkish series "Valley of the Wolves," which sparked a Turkish-Israeli diplomatic row for its negative portrayal of Israelis.

When the Murdoch-Alwaleed partnership was announced, it stirred speculation Fox News would launch an Arabic news channel to compete with rivals Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, both respected and widely watched across the Arab world.

Murdoch has denied such a plan.

Dressed in tangerine jump suits, the roughly 1,500 convicted murderers, rapists and other inmates perform a series of Michael Jackson-inspired dances that have helped boost their morale while also making them Internet sensations.

"When we are dancing we tend to forget why we were here in the first place," 19-year-old Torrecampo, the flamboyant lead dancer of the jailhouse troupe, told AFP after a recent courtyard performance.

Torrecampo, an openly gay former call centre employee, was sentenced in 2008 to six years in jail for attempted murder after stabbing his 69-year-old American boyfriend.

His enforced move to the jail in Cebu, the Philippines' second biggest city, earned him a slot in a team that had improbably rocketed to global fame the previous year.

The Internet phenomenon began when footage of the prisoners performing the zombie dance from Jackson's "Thriller" music video was posted on the video-sharing website YouTube.

It quickly became one of the most watched clips on the Internet and has now registered nearly 40 million hits.

Dozens of different dances from the inmates have since been posted on the web, many of which have also gone viral and been watched by millions.

These include the Village People's "Y.M.C.A.", the rapper MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This", Queen's "Radio Gaga", and even the Gregorian Chants in the middle of a Catholic mass celebrated on the prison yard.

Their latest brought them heavyweight recognition as Jackson's choreographer travelled to the jail in January to train them to dance for the King of Pop's "They Don't Care About Us" song, which was used to promote his posthumous DVD.

"We are ordinary people. At first we could not believe that we would be visited by an extraordinary person who teaches Hollywood stars to dance," Torrecampo said of Travis Payne, Jackson's choreographer.

The "Don't Care About Us" clip has scored 4.4 million hits on YouTube in less than three months.

A former security consultant at the jail, Byron Garcia, came up with the idea in 2006 of using dance as a way to rehabilitate the prisoners and give them a break from the daily grind of life behind bars.

"Rehabilitation has to be anchored on bringing out the best in men instead of the worst of men," Garcia wrote on his personal website.

"If we make jails a living hell for these inmates, then we might just be turning out devils once they are released!"

There has been some controversy over allegations that the inmates have been forced into dancing, and that they have become a tourist attraction with visitors paying to watch their performances.

Orange prison-style T-shirts promoting the dancers are for sale at the jail for 170 pesos (3.7 dollars).

The tourist shows were suspended recently as the governor of Cebu province, Gwendolyn Garcia, who is the sister of Byron, apparently sought to quash rumours that her family was profiting from the dancing venture.

"I think you are all aware of the intrigues, the innuendos, the whispers, unfairly or unjustly accusing certain personalities of benefiting from such fame," she told local reporters last month.

"In order to put a stop to all of this, I issued a memorandum reminding one and all that all activities that have been going on must be cleared with the office of the governor, namely myself."

Nevertheless, the inmates were brought out for an AFP team on a recent visit, and prison warden Lito Gabuya insisted the dancing was all voluntary.

"They are proud of it," Gabuya told AFP. "Almost all inmates dance, except those who are sick or elderly."

For Torrecampo, dancing has given him hope that he may have a meaningful career after he is released.

"I want to become a choreographer -- maybe even a film star," he said.

Watch Philippine inmates dance to Michael Jackson's "Thriller":

Watch Philippine inmates dance to Michael Jackson's "The Don't Care About Us":

"The Masters is where I won my first major and I view this tournament with great respect. After a long and necessary time away from the game, I feel like I'm ready to start my season at Augusta," he said on his website.

The world's number one golfer put his game on hold in the wake of a major sex scandal which erupted at the end of last year.

"I have undergone almost two months of inpatient therapy and I am continuing my treatment," Woods added. "Although I'm returning to competition, I still have a lot of work to do in my personal life."

The Masters starts on April 8.

ROME (AFP) – Around 50 left-wing municipal officials dropped their trousers at Rome's city hall on Monday to call for the speedy passage of the Italian capital's 2010 budget.

"Alemanno has reduced us to our underwear," read one protester's poster, referring to the city's right-wing mayor Gianni Alemanno.

"Parks and gardens abandoned," "Homeless people, empty homes," others read.

Sandro Medici, the mayor of Cinecitta, the home of the city's legendary movie studios, said Alemanno was dragging his feet over passing the budget "for electoral reasons, because it contains unpopular taxes."

"Without a budget, we only have funds for current expenses," he told AFP. "In my district, two schools that are supposed to open in September won't be able to operate."

Eleven of Rome's 19 districts are headed by left-wing mayors.

Alemanno, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right People of Freedom party and formerly of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement, wrested city hall from the left-wing Walter Veltroni in 2008.

Italy is set to hold elections in 13 of the country's 20 regions, including Rome's Lazio region, at the end of the month.

Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrived in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez to probe the fatal shootings of two American and a Mexican with ties to the US consulate -- the first such attack in recent memory on American diplomatic personnel.

Mexican authorities blamed the drive-by murders of the American employee of the US consulate, her husband and the husband of a Mexican consular employee on "the Aztecas," a gang linked to the powerful Juarez drug cartel.

But investigators said it was still unclear why the victims were singled out by hit teams who ambushed the two family groups just minutes apart Saturday after they left a birthday party in Ciudad Juarez.

"It could be a mistaken identity, it could be that they were targeted; we don't know at this point," said special agent Andrea Simmons of the FBI's El Paso, Texas, office just across the border from Ciudad Juarez.

She said seven or eight FBI agents had joined the investigation, along with agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Meanwhile the bodies of the two Americans slain in the attacks were taken across the border to El Paso for post-mortem examinations.

Police on Monday also located the charred van in a residential section of Juarez which they believed was used in the hit job. The van, which had been reported stolen by its owners, was found about two kilometers (1.2 miles) from where the Saturday's shooting took place on the outskirts of the city.

According to neighbors, the driver of the van, along with two hooded men who followed in separate vehicles, doused the car in gasoline and set it ablaze.

The shocking attacks, which occurred in broad daylight, came amid escalating violence in Juarez, where a raging drug war has claimed thousands of lives in the past few years.

Violence here ratcheted up almost from the start of President Felipe Calderon's administration in December 2006, after his decision to deploy the military to crack down on drug traffickers who had operated for years with near impunity.

Calderon, who was due Tuesday to travel to the troubled border city for the third time in two months, reaffirmed Mexico's "commitments to solve these crimes."

"We will, as the secretary and president pledged, work tirelessly with Mexican authorities to bring the killers... to justice," State Department Spokesman Philip Crowley said in Washington.

The State Department also updated its existing travel warnings, warning Americans against travel to northern Mexico and strongly cautioning American students against spending their spring break holidays in Mexico.

US officials moved to close the facility pending the outcome of a security review.

The shooting victims were identified as Lesley Enriquez, an American working at the consulate; her American husband, Arthur Redelfs; and Jorge Alberto Sarcido, the Mexican husband of another consular employee.

Enriquez and her husband were killed in a hail of bullets as they were driving back to the US side of the border with their one-year-old daughter in the back seat, officials said. The baby survived unharmed.

In a separate attack, gunmen opened fire on Sarcido's car, killing him and wounding his two children, ages four and seven. His wife, a Mexican employee of the consulate, was following in a second car and escaped injury, a US official said.

President Barack Obama said Sunday he was "deeply saddened and outraged" by the killings, which marked an ominous turn in an already bloody war waged by the cartels on rivals and authorities.

More than 2,600 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez in 2009 in drug-related violence as the cartels battle for control over the lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.

Drug-related violence claimed more than 100 lives across Mexico just last weekend, police data showed.

Among the hardest hit areas were Guerrero state, home to the major tourist destination of Acapulco, where the notorious "La Familia" drug cartel is active. There were 45 weekend murders in Guerrero, police said.

Nahdlatul Ulama deputy chairman Maskuri Abdillah said the visit would strengthen frayed ties between the United States and the Muslim world.

"We call on all Muslims in Indonesia not to join any protest rejecting the visit of President Obama to Indonesia," he told AFP.

"This call has been made following our concerns about a number of protests by some Muslim groups who stand against the visit.

"We must welcome Obama as his visit will be positive in terms of the US relationship with the Muslim world."

Thousands of demonstrators from radical Muslim group Hizbut Tahrir, which aims to establish an Islamic caliphate, rallied against Obama on Sunday, tearing US flags and calling America a terrorist state.

Such groups have little support in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country where Obama lived for four years as a child.

He is scheduled to leave the United States on March 21 for the trip, which will include stops in Guam and Australia.

The visit is expected to build on a speech Obama gave last year in Cairo, in which he promised to mend fences with the Islamic world after years of discord under the previous administration of George W Bush.

"Obama has a different personality to his predecessor George Bush. Obama has the political will to improve US ties with the Muslim world," Abdillah said.

The Nahdlatul Ulama, a moderate Sunni group with about 30 million members, is one of the largest Islamic mass organizations in the world.

Farms in the Franschhoek Valley had been emptied by rampaging Chachma baboons, who sneak into secured plots and help themselves with top grade grapes, The Times newspaper said.

"They can easily wipe out up to two tonnes of grapes a week when you are not watching, and that makes about 1,500 to 2,000 bottles of wine," said Mark Dendy-Young, farm manager of La Petite Ferme.

Dendy-Young said he had lost up to 40 percent of his harvest last month to the baboons.

He said the thieving was unwittingly taking farmers back to the traditional ways of French wine making, where few grapes are harvested.

"In some parts of France, they would let you yield only a small amount... the baboons are doing it naturally for us," said Dendy-Young.