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came decades of bitter hostilities and took their first tentative step toward ending one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies with the ceremonial signing of a preliminary peace pact Monday that both sides said presented both a hope and a challenge.
• The framework agreement, also called a roadmap to a final peace settlement

that is expected by 2016, grants minority Muslims in the southern Philippines broad autonomy in exchange for ending more than 40 years of violence that has killed tens of thousands of people and crippled development.
• It was signed in Manila's Malacanang presidential palace by government negotiator Marvic Leonen and his counterpart from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Mohagher Iqbal. Also on hand to witness the historic moment were President Benigno Aquino III, rebel chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim -- who set foot in the palace for the first time -- and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose country helped broker the deal.

• "We are men and leaders who want to make a difference and we have decided that the time has come for us to choose the moral high ground," Najib said. He said the deal "will protect the rights of the Bangsamoro people and preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Philippines."
• He cautioned it "does not solve all the problems, rather it sets the parameters in which peace can be found.
• ___

• JERUSALEM (AP) -- Amal Ashour, 18, loves Shakespeare and American pop music. One of the brightest students in the Gaza Strip, she studied her senior year of high school in Minnesota through a U.S.-government funded program.
• She had planned to study English literature this fall at a university in the West Bank through another U.S.-sponsored program, but just a month before school started, she was informed the scholarship was no longer available.
• "When you live in Gaza, you're a pawn in a greater political game," she said in a telephone interview. "There's nothing we can do about it." She is now enrolled at Islamic University, a stronghold of Gaza's ruling Islamic militant Hamas.
• Under Israeli pressure, U.S. officials have quietly canceled a two-year-old scholarship program for students in the Gaza Strip, undercutting one of the few American outreach programs to people in the Hamas-ruled territory. The program now faces

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