News in Brief

French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday to renew stalled peace negotiations with Israel, shortly after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Paris. A statement from Sarkozy's office said the French president stressed to Abbas the urgency of resuming the Middle East peace process. (AP and Haaretz Staff)

The stalemate in talks for the release of abducted soldier Gilad Shalit is deliberate, an Israeli source close to the indirect talks with Hamas said yesterday. He said the talks were deferred until close to the elections in the Palestinian Authority, initially scheduled for the end of January 2010, as part of an overall deal with Hamas. However, senior Fatah sources have cautioned against carrying out the deal on the elections eve. They said Hamas would take credit for the expected release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and could win the elections as a result. (Akiva Eldar)

Veteran Haaretz reporters Yossi Melman and Zvi Bar'el have been awarded the prestigious 2009 Sokolov Prize for Journalism, the prize committee announced yesterday. Melman, Haaretz's intelligence affairs correspondent, who has written extensively on Iran, was given the prize for journalistic research; Bar'el, the paper's Middle East commentator, received a lifetime achievement award. In the electronic media, the winners were David Witzthum, who won the lifetime achievement award; and reporter Omri Asenheim, for the investigative television program "Uvda" (Fact). Asenheim conducted the research that exposed the IDF's secret anthrax vaccine experiment on its soldiers. (Gili Izikovich)

The Tel Aviv District Court yesterday sentenced two men to seven years in prison and a suspended term for conspiring to assault talent agent Boaz Ben Zion. Roman Alayev of Ramle and Mohammed Yunis of Arara were hired by former television star Dudu Topaz to attack Ben Zion, but aroused neighbors' suspicion and were arrested by the police before they did so. They were convicted in a plea bargain for conspiracy to commit a crime and for attempted aggravated assault. The court criticized the plea bargain for being too lenient but did not overturn it. (Ofra Edelman)