Extry! Read all about it! Extry! Fiskie winner to certify Holocaust denier’s sham election! Ex-U.S. President Carter to Monitor Palestinian Vote.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who won a Nobel peace prize partly for his Middle East peace efforts, said on Wednesday he would head an observer mission to monitor the Palestinian presidential elections next month.

Carter, who helped broker the 1979 Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel, said his Carter Center had been invited by Palestinian leaders to monitor the Jan. 9 poll. Carter told Reuters he was hopeful about the elections to replace the late President Yasser Arafat. “You have to be optimistic. I have the hope and expectation that the elections will be honest, fair, free and safe,” he said in an interview.

He hoped a Palestinian leader would emerge who had the confidence of his people, who would not be seen as a puppet of the Israelis or the Americans and who would speak out strongly against violence as a way to achieve Palestinian goals.

“I think we have increasingly a good chance to see that occur,” Carter said in an interview.

The nonprofit Carter Center works to mediate and prevent conflict and has sent observers to more than 50 elections around the world, including Palestinian elections in 1996.

“Ever since then the Palestinian leaders — Arafat and his successors — have told me that when and if they have another election they want the Carter Center to be observing it.”