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propelled toward a stark choice that could come as soon as next week, define his legacy and set the course for his people in a decades-old conflict with Israel.
• Abbas' aides fear he's being pushed by the U.S. into dropping his conditions for negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That includes a stop in Israeli settlement construction or acceptance that the basis of a future border is Israel's frontier before it captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in a 1967 war.
• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is returning next week for meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu, his fifth since taking office this year. It's not clear if he'll present U.S. ground rules for negotiation at that time. The sense in Palestinian leadership circles is that there is no significant pressure on Netanyahu to adopt the framework for talks accepted by his predecessor and that a high-stakes choice cannot be delayed much longer.
• At the heart of the Palestinian dilemma is that despite the American eagerness for talks and their own desire to end Israel's 46-year-old occupation, they have low expectations of negotiations with Netanyahu. Most Palestinians consider the Israeli leader a hard-line ideologue who intends to drag out the process and never agree to anything close to terms they could live with.
• Israel's current leaders "never believed in the two-state solution ... and will do everything on the ground to make it impossible to achieve," said Abbas aide Nabil Shaath, a veteran negotiator with Israel.
• ___

• HIGHWOOD RIVER, Calgary (AP) -- As many as 100,000 people could be forced from their homes by heavy flooding in western Canada, Calgary city officials said, while mudslides forced the closure of the Trans-Canada Highway, isolating the mountain resort towns of Banff and Canmore.
• Torrential rains and widespread flooding throughout southern Alberta on Thursday washed out roads and bridges, left at least one person missing and caused cars, couches and refrigerators to float away. Communities were hit hard just south of Calgary, a city of more than a million people that hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics.
• Many downtown neighborhoods were ordered evacuated as the evening went on. Officials said the evacuation would take place in stages over the next few days. The province reported that 12 communities were under states of emergency.
• Water levels were expected to reach their maximum around noon on Friday.

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