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China called on all parties concerned on Wednesday to carry out “independent and reliable investigations into all activities that violate the international humanitarian law and human rights conventions, and hold the perpetrators accountable.”

The appeal came as Zhang Yesui, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, was taking the floor at the plenary session of the 64th General Assembly, which opened on Wednesday morning to consider the Goldstone report. The Goldstone report accuses both Israel and Palestine of war crimes in the 22-day Gaza conflict.

“We call on all parties concerned to remain engaged in cooperation with relevant UN organs and agencies, carry out independent and reliable investigations into all activities that violate the international humanitarian law and human rights conventions, and hold the perpetrators accountable,” Zhang said. “In the meantime, the UN organs and agencies should perform their respective functions, and work in strict accordance with their mandates.

“The Chinese government has followed very closely the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, especially in Gaza,” he added. “The blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip over the years, particularly the military actions at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, has inflicted a serious humanitarian crisis on the Palestinian people, and caused enormous casualties to innocent civilians.

“Our hearts go out for the plight of the Palestinian people,” he continued. “On the other hand, we understand the security concerns of Israel, and are equally saddened by the civilian casualties of Israel.

“Such concerns, however, should not be an excuse for excessive use of force that brings damage to innocent civilians. Both the Palestinians and Israelis should enjoy the equal rights to survival and personal security,” he asserted.

“We oppose any violence against civilians, and urge the parties concerned to comply with the international humanitarian law and human rights conventions,” Zhang urged. (more…)

 Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada’s planned visit to the United States possibly later this week for talks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been canceled due to Japan’s parliamentary schedule, the Japanese government’s top spokesman said Wednesday.

At a regular press conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano confirmed the cancellation, saying the talks have been canceled as it is difficult for Okada to leave Japan during the ongoing Diet deliberations.

Hirano denied the cancellation will have any negative effect on Japan-U.S. relations ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nov. 12-13 visit to Japan.

Over the weekend, the U.S. State Department said Clinton and Okada would meet Friday in Washington, but soon retracted the announcement.

 Federal officials said Monday they are seeking information about the killing of a 64-year-old nun whose body was found Sunday on the Navajo reservation in northwest New Mexico.

Sister Marguerite Bartz’s body was found in her convent in Navajo, New Mexico, in a remote area of the Four Corners region, said Lee Lamb, communications director for the diocese. Her home had been broken into and her car stolen, Lamb said.

According to the FBI, which has jurisdiction, Bartz was killed between Halloween night and Sunday morning. When she did not appear at Sunday Mass, a colleague checked on her and found her body.

The FBI said it was looking for her beige 2005 HONDA CR-V with New Jersey license plate NF24821.

Bartz, born in 1945 in Plymouth, Wisconsin, entered the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1966 from Beaumont, Texas, and professed final vows in 1974, according to the diocese.

She held a bachelor of arts degree from Xavier University in New Orleans and a master’s in religious education from Loyola University, also in New Orleans.

For more than 40 years, Bartz was missioned in Dorchester, Massachusetts; Lawtell, Louisiana; Guadalupe Indian Mission in Pena Blanca, New Mexico; St. Joseph in Laguna, New Mexico; St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and since 1999, St. Berard’s in Navajo, New Mexico.

“She was known to be a woman always passionate for justice and peace — and the life she lived would tell us that she would respond to this incident with a spirit of forgiveness towards whoever is responsible for these acts,” the diocese said in a statement.

Sixteen members of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a religious order founded 118 years ago by St. Katherine Drexel, minister in the Diocese of Gallup.

Take a trip to Pakistan’s tribal district of South Waziristan these days and there’s no guarantee you won’t get hurt, kidnapped or something worse.

The restive and largely ungoverned region is the headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban and believed to be one of the most dangerous places in the world.

But the Pakistan army extended a rare invitation to a group of journalists to show they have the Taliban on the run. The trip was carefully organized and our military hosts would show us only what they wanted us to see.

Even so, this was the first time journalists could independently verify some of the army’s claims of progress in their showdown against the Taliban.

The early morning chopper ride over Pakistan’s mountainous tribal region was a reminder why this is an ideal safe haven for the world’s most notorious militants.

This is no-man’s land, one of the most severe terrains in the world. The ethnic Pashtuns who live here are few but fiercely independent and rugged like their mountains.

Some of history’s mightiest armies have tried to conquer this land and its people, only to be humbled in the end.

Our first stop was a hilltop in the Sherwangai region where we received a briefing by General Khalid Rabanni, a stocky commander who’s leading one of three divisions taking the fight to the Taliban.

The army says its strategy is to surround the Taliban from three sides, move in and kill as many militants as possible.

The strategy was going as planned, said Rabbani, with roughly 28,000 troops steadily beating back the Taliban, capturing heights and hilltops, then moving down into the valleys to take over villages.

“It’s a professional army and there’s no way they can beat us,” said Khalid. “We’ve been able to outclass them, kill them at places, push them back at places.” In a nearby village where mud-walled homes lay in ruins from air strikes, soldiers showed off captured weapons and ammunition.

Most of the Taliban’s arsenal came from Afghanistan, they said, a not so subtle jab at the U.S. and NATO operation across the border.

Two laptops and a busted hard drive were on display, as well. The army says the Taliban here had Internet access.

Among the seized items, a German passport got the most attention from journalists. The passport appeared to belong to suspected 9/11 plotter Said Bahaji, the alleged member of the notorious Hamburg cell who’s still a wanted man by U.S. and German investigators.

The passport looked real, but it was impossible to be sure.

Initially several army officials were not aware of the passport’s possible significance. Later the army’s spokesman said he would investigate. The document is perhaps proof that when members of al Qaeda want to hide, Pakistan’s tribal region is a favorite destination.

Two officers told me they suspect Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is still in South Waziristan backed by up to 8,000 Taliban fighters including roughly 1,000 Uzbek militants.

The toughest fights are still to come, they said, in the Taliban strongholds of Kanigurm and Sararogha. Three times since 2004 the army has launched similar offensives here without success, sometimes agreeing to peace deals that eventually fell apart.

This time a peace deal is not an option, said army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas.

“Certainly there is no scope of a peace deal,” Abbas told CNN. “It is a fight to the finish.”

The army is not so certain if success in South Waziristan will mean an immediate end to the wave of deadly suicide bombings in Pakistan. That, said Abbas, would be a long haul.

Six women found dead at a Cleveland, Ohio, home appeared to have been strangled, and their decomposing bodies could have been lying there for “weeks, if not months or years,” a coroner told CNN on Saturday.

Police discovered the bodies at the home of Anthony Sowell, a 50-year-old convicted rapist, after they tried to serve an arrest and search warrant for him related to a sexual assault investigation.

On Thursday, detectives from the department’s sex-crimes unit and members of its SWAT team went to Sowell’s home to execute the warrant and to arrest the suspect, but he was nowhere to be found, Cleveland Police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho said.

Five female victims were found inside the home, and another female body was discovered outside the home, said Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller III.

Miller’s office had yet to identify the victims, who all died of “homicidal violence,” he said.

“They were mostly strangled, it appears,” he said.

Stacho said a tipster told officers of Sowell’s whereabouts and police arrested him Saturday afternoon as he walked on a street near the 4th District Police Headquarters.

About a month ago, a woman accused Sowell of rape and felonious assault, Stacho said Friday.

“Once we were able to get the cooperation of the victim, we secured an arrest warrant for Mr. Sowell and subsequently a search warrant for his premises,” Stacho said.

Officers serving the warrants Thursday discovered two badly decomposed bodies on the third floor of the house, Stacho said. A subsequent search revealed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave under the stairs in the basement, he said.

On Friday, investigators returned to the house, dug up the grave and found a third body, he said.

A further search of the house and property found two more bodies in a crawl space, and a sixth body was found in a shallow grave outside the home, Stacho said.

Read local coverage on CNN affiliate WJW

Five different burial methods were used on the victims, and the bodies were in varying states of decomposition, Miller said, making it difficult to determine the ages of the victims. He added that the states of the bodies made it hard to tell how long they had lain in the makeshift graves.

“It’s really very difficult to tell,” Miller said. “It’s been some time, I would say probably at least weeks, if not months or years.”

Stacho said Sowell makes his living as a “scrapper.”

“He walks around and picks up scrap metal and takes it to junkyards to make a few pennies.”

Sowell was convicted for a 1989 rape for which he was imprisoned from 1990 to 2005, Stacho said.

Chinese officials say two pandas destined for an Australian zoo will be transported before the end of the year, and the two sides are actively making necessary preparations.

Zhang Shanning, an official from the State Forestry Administration, denied previous reports that the pandas, Wang Wang and Funi, had been due to begin their quarantine period in Adelaide on Oct. 17, but that this had been delayed.

“Construction of the giant panda house in Adelaide Zoo was just finished in September, and our experts who inspected it just returned from Australia on Oct. 28. There is no delay. This is just normal,” said Zhang.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday, “During talks with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Sydney this morning, Vice Premier Li Keqiang promised to transport the two pandas within this year.”

Wangwang and Funi are still in the Wolong-based China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in southwest China’s Sichuan Province,

The administration is sending the pair to Adelaide as part of a10-year co-study as a goodwill gesture promised by President Hu Jintao during a visit to Australia in September 2007.

Wangwang and Funi had been in isolation quarantine since Sept. 21, said Zhang.

After the May 12 earthquake last year, Wangwang and Funi were taken to Ya’an Panda Breeding Base from the Wolong center, which was seriously damaged.

Training of Australian panda handlers and vets was complete and if necessary, the zoo would send more staff to China for further instruction, Zhang said.

The Adelaide Zoo had experts in bamboo cultivation, panda breeding, transportation and zoo management prepared for the pandas’ arrival, he said.

The male panda, Wangwang, born on Aug. 31, 2005, weighed 119 kilograms, and the female, Funi, born on Aug. 23, 2006, weighed 90kilograms, said Zhang.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) held a disarmament seminar on Thursday on the occasion of “U.N. Disarmament Week (Oct. 24-30).”

The meeting was attended by researchers and scientists from the International Affairs Institute and the Disarmament and Peace Institute of the DPRK.

They discussed a series of issues including how to improve the function and role of the U.N. and the Geneva disarmament conference, and the efficiency and limitations of international treaties and agreements on disarmament.

They believed that the world’s biggest nuclear weapons states should take the lead in materializing nuclear disarmament.

They underlined the need to make the “hostile forces roll back their policies of antagonizing the DPRK” as well as pressurize the U.S. forces to pull back from South Korea and its vicinity, and stop all forms of war exercises there.

It was also important to hold in check U.S. moves for building a missile shield as it might trigger a new arms race, they added.

“I think whoever is going to send more troops to Afghanistan will put up some conditions,” said Gade, whose country has 690 soldiers in Afghanistan.

“They need to see the new Afghan president and say: ‘If we send more troops to your country, you have to deal with this, this and this.’ We have to make sure the new government in Afghanistan are committed to their job before we send any more troops to Afghanistan.”

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung of Germany said he also doesn’t expect his country to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan when the soldiers’ mandate from the German parliament comes up for renewal in December. The existing mandate allows the deployment of a maximum 4,500 soldiers, and Germany currently has just over 4,200 troops in Afghanistan.

Other officials, however, expressed doubts about sending more forces amid widespread concerns of corruption tainting Afghanistan’s government and its president, Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan will hold a runoff of its presidential election on Nov. 7 to settle allegations of fraud that marred an August balloting between Karzai and his chief rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Dutch Defense Minister Eimert Van Middelkoop said his country, with 2,160 troops in Afghanistan, is awaiting the final election results “because the legitimacy of the Afghan government is key,” as well as a decision by the Obama administration.

Danish Defense Minister Soeren Gade said allies won’t increase troop levels until they’re assured the new government in Kabul is committed to the NATO goals.

“I have registered broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach, but without discussing resource implications of these recommendations,” Rasmussen said.

The top U.N. official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, also signaled that more NATO troops would soon be on the move. “I do believe that additional international troops will be needed in the future,” he said.

Gates spoke before heading into a lunch meeting with officials from nations that have sent troops to Afghanistan. McChrystal also was at the meeting to brief the officials on his on-the-ground assessment of the war zone.

An estimated 104,000 U.S. and NATO troops will be in Afghanistan by the end of the year — two-thirds of which are American.