Israel is awaiting a new government, the Palestinians are seriously divided, and President Bush is looking for an agreement by the end of the year, although both Palestinians and Israelis have expressed doubt about achieving that goal.

"This meeting, which took place at crucial time in the peace process, and on the eve of the meeting of the Quartet, provided an opportunity to discuss the European Union's enhanced role in the peace process deepening relations between the European Union and the Palestinian Authority," the EU said in a statement.

But a group of leading aid agencies, including CARE, Save the Children and Christian Aid, issued a report Thursday warning the Quartet process was failing and called for more action and less words.

"The Quartet has fundamentally failed to improve the humanitarian situation on the ground. Unless the Quartet's words are matched by more sustained pressure and decisive action the situation will deteriorate still further. Time is fast running out," David Mepham, director of policy for Save the Children UK, said in a statement.

As late as last month Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held out hope of talks succeeding. "God willing, with the goodwill of the parties, and the tireless work of the parties, we have a good chance of succeeding," Rice said after seeing Israeli and Palestinian leaders and summoning top negotiators for a joint status report.

Israeli President Shimon Peres told the General Assembly in his address Wednesday that despite "stagnation and regression and failure" in the peace process, "Israelis and Arabs are marching toward peace."

There's a ticking time bomb underneath the oceans, and it's about to go off, some scientists say.

A Russian research ship trawling the Arctic off Siberia's northeastern coast has found huge amounts of methane bubbling up from the seafloor, according to reports in London's Independent newspaper and the Canadian Press wire service.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. While there's little of it in the atmosphere, there are gigantic frozen deposits of it, called methane clathrates, trapped in rocks in seabeds all over the world.

One of the leading global-warming doomsday scenarios involves all that methane thawing out as sea temperatures rise, then rushing to the surface and into the air, creating a runaway warming scenario. Now there's some evidence that's beginning to happen.

"For the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface," Swedish researcher Orjan Gustafsson, aboard the Russian ship Jacob Smirnitskyi, told the Independent in an article published last week. Huge methane releases may have been responsible for mass extinctions in Earth's distant past.

"It's a time bomb because, as the permafrost thaws - and we don't know how fast it will thaw - it's going to slowly and maybe catastrophically at some point, release all that methane that's trapped underneath as a solid," Marianne Douglas, head of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute, told the Canadian Press.