News Brief

Israel asked the Bush administration to pull a resolution hailing the Annapolis peace parley, said the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Zalmay Khalilzad was on the hot seat this week after the Bush administration pulled a draft resolution on Nov. 30 hailing the peace conference that he had submitted to the U.N. Security Council. Khalilzad told Reuters Tuesday that he believed the decision to pull the resolution came from “the highest level” of the Israeli government. Israeli and Palestinian officials said last week they had seen the draft resolution. Though the Israelis told the press they had no objection to the text, they argued that a Security Council resolution was an inappropriate measure. “There was a concern that some had whether, if a draft resolution was introduced, other things would be brought in by interested members of the council that would make it more complicated than a simple welcoming and endorsing of what had happened,” Khalilzad told Reuters. The ambassador was quick to deny media reports that he had submitted the draft to the Security Council without approval from the State Department. “We don’t just write a text in the mission and come and present it to people,” he said. “We are an organized government, institutionalized. We are not a banana republic.”

Two Jewish promoters said stunt driver Evel Knievel was a virulent anti-Semite.

The promoters publicized Knievel’s famous 1974 attempt to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. One is suing Knievel’s estate for part of a judgment that was never paid after Knievel beat him with a baseball bat. Knievel died Nov. 30 from pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 69. Shelly Saltman, 76, had won $12.75 million in damages from Knievel in 1977 after the daredevil was convicted of beating him with a baseball bat over an unvarnished book Saltman had written about him. Saltman told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he is suing Knievel’s estate, claiming that the unpaid damages plus interest now add up to more than $100 million. Knievel claimed that Saltman had portrayed him as “an alcoholic, a pill addict, an anti-Semite and an immoral person,” while Saltman said that he believed it was an accurate portrayal of a man he had admired. Promoter Bob Arum, 77, called BoxingConfidential.com’s Michael Marley on the evening of Knievel’s death to remind readers of Knievel’s temperament. “He used to always say the three things he hated the most were New Yorkers, lawyers and Jews, so I was three for three with this guy,” Arum told the boxing Web site in a call from his home in Albuquerque.