North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops last week started mandatory refresher training on how to handle the Koran. Troops are now told flatly not to dispose of Korans and will be urged to err on the side of caution when dealing with Arabic texts, assuming “material is sacred if there is any doubt over its religious significance.”

But some experts think the more explicit approach might not stop future incidents. Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist who has worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department, said the issuance of cultural do’s and don’ts was only useful to a point.

“It makes culture into a set of arbitrary rules. You don’t understand why,” she said. “The Bible is not considered itself a holy object, and unless you’d grown up in a religious tradition where that was true, you wouldn’t understand the way that Muslims feel about the Koran.

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The news that six UK soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan was met by duly respectful and stoical tributes yesterday, first in Downing Street, then at the Ministry of Defence, and then in Parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions. The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, insisted that what had happened would “not shake our resolve to see through the mission”. David Cameron stressed the commitment of the troops to “getting the job done”, while offering “everypossible support” to a political settlement….

With the date for withdrawal almost three years away, however, these fatalities cannot be seen in isolation. And it is hard to escape the impression that, even as the training of Afghan soldiers and police continues, little is changing so far as the authority of the government, overall security and the safety of foreign troops are concerned.

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US troops who burned copies of the Koran at a base in Afghanistan last month should have been aware it would enrage Muslims based on the reaction to previous instances of desecrating Islam’s holy book, the head of Afghanistan’s independent human rights body says.

Sima Samar, chairwoman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said Americans previously have dealt with issues relating to the treatment of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and had seen the furor created by the burning of the Koran at a Florida church last year.

US officials have said that the Korans were confiscated from prisoners at Bagram air base and mistakenly discarded in an incinerator.

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The international community is set to restart talks with Iran on its nuclear program, the European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday, opening a diplomatic channel at a time of increased tensions between Tehran and Western powers.

Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, on Tuesday wrote to Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, that the EU proposed resuming talks “as soon as possible.” The agreement was a response to a letter from Mr. Jalili in February asking for talks at the “earliest” opportunity.

The announcement comes a day after U.S. and Israeli leaders met in Washington to discuss Iran’s nuclear-development program. The U.S. and many EU states have accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran has denied.

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“What started as targeted sanctions to push back the nuclear program has in reality turned into comprehensive, broad sanctions that have hurt the Iranian people,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Iran Project in Washington.

If Western governments are counting on economic deprivation to bring radical change in Iran, analysts say they are likely to be disappointed.

“History shows that sanctions do not yield regime change — this is particularly true for states that emerged out of revolutions,” said Middle East analyst Arshin Adib-Moghaddam of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

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American Christians would be understandably outraged if they learned of Muslims burning the Bible. Muslims have an even greater reverence for their holy book. Omid Safi, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, notes that Muslims look at the Qur’an the way Christians look at Jesus. “In an Islamic universe . . . the word becomes not a person, but a book,” he says. “For a Muslim to see the Qur’an burnt . . . it would look and feel like someone burning Jesus, or a crucifix.”

Christians should at least understand and respect the way Muslims look at the Qur’an. Most Muslims have a higher regard for the Bible than most Christians have for the Qur’an. It is unlikely that a Muslim would ever burn a Bible.

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Curiously missing in this flurry of coverage has been a more considered assessment of the internal dynamics in play for Israeli decision-makers and how those might be most effectively influenced. Too often, the calculations of Israel’s leaders are depicted as if this were a collection of think-tankers and trauma victims given a very big and high-tech army to play with. Netanyahu represents the latter, guided by his “existentialist mindset” and his 101-year-old historian father. (The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg drew heavily on the father-son relationship in his assessment 18 months ago that an Israeli strike on Iran was imminent.) Peter Beinart has written, “Benjamin Netanyahu has only one mode: apocalyptic.” And the prime minister often depicts contemporary realities as akin to 1938.

In Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the lead protagonist, Solomon Kugel, discovers a living and elderly Anne Frank in his attic, at one level seemingly a metaphor for the identity politics of contemporary American Jewry — we all carry Anne Frank around with us in our heads. Bibi Netanyahu can sometimes sound like an Israeli version of Solomon Kugel, the difference being that in the Israeli “attic” we keep both Anne Frank and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the two apparently merging when it comes to the prime minister’s depiction of the threat posed by Iran and how it should be handled….

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U.S. officials say they see Iran’s hand in the increasingly brutal crackdown on opposition strongholds in Syria, including evidence of Iranian military and intelligence support for government troops accused of mass executions and other atrocities in the past week.

Three U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports from the region described a spike in Iran­ian-supplied arms and other aid for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad at a time when the regime is mounting an unprecedented offensive to crush resistance in the key city of Homs.

“The aid from Iran is increasing, and is increasingly focused on lethal assistance,” said one of the officials, insisting on anonymity to discuss intelligence reports from the region.

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Saudi Arabia has raised the price of its flagship Arab Light crude oil for customers in Asia, who buy more than half its crude exports, by $1.25 a barrel for April….

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Some officials found the current case particularly troubling because it followed more than 10 years at war in the Muslim world, in which outrage over even the rumor of American defacement of Korans has caused previous crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations.

An American military official familiar with the joint investigation somberly described the burning as a “tragedy,” but rejected any suggestion that it was intentional. He said that the joint commission of three senior Afghan security officials and an American military officer was convinced that the military personnel involved in making the decision to get rid of the Korans and those who carried out the order did not set out to defile the Muslim holy book.

“There was no maliciousness, there was no deliberateness, there was not an intentional disrespect of Islam,” he said.

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The ground assault by Syrian forces in central city of Homs has evoked memories of a massacre 30 years ago in nearby Hama.

At least 10,000 people were killed in February 1982 during the three-week pounding of the city by government artillery and tanks that was ordered by Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current president.

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The Taliban is attempting to capitalize on the outbreak of violence that followed the inadvertent burning of the holy Quran by NATO troops by characterizing the war as a conflict between infidels and Islam, analysts say.

“It’s tailor-made to their argument that the United States is trying to desecrate and destroy Islam,” said Seth Jones, an analyst at RAND Corp. and author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan. “It’s patently untrue.”

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Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban’s momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces, and they believe that the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound,” said Pentagon spokesman George Little.

In private, other officers and U.S. officials said riots and attacks after U.S. personnel threw copies of the Koran into a trash-burning pit at the Bagram military base have renewed a debate at the highest levels of the Obama administration and are expected to affect internal deliberations on the pace of the drawdown.

“Too many people are asking, ‘Why are we still doing this if the guys you’re supposed to be helping keep murdering your soldiers?’ ” said a senior U.S. general….

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Twenty-eight thousand men, women and children are trapped in Baba Amr. Last week, before American journalist Marie Colvin was killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik, Colvin reported that the Syrian army had dug a trench around the neighbourhood, making it almost impossible for residents to escape. On Monday, activists reported that 64 people were killed at a checkpoint in Homs. They were trying to flee Baba Amr.

Medical supplies aren’t just running low in the besieged suburb – they’re practically nonexistent. “People come to you with a huge injury, and you can’t do anything more than wrap their injury with a bandage,” he says. “After you go to the field hospital, and take what you can from the two or three doctors, you can’t do anything else. You have to go back home, or to the shelters we have, waiting for some miracle to happen.”

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…[Italian Prime Minister Mario] Monti’s joint letter with twelve EU states last week calling for an end to self-defeating contraction marks a key moment in this crisis. If Francois Hollande is elected French president in May, the shift in Europe’s balance of power will be complete. Germany will lose its stifling grip on EU policy machinery. The EMU bloc will start to tilt towards reflation at long last.

Whether it can come soon enough to avert a social explosion across Europe’s arc of depression remains to be seen. Nor can such stimulus overcome the fundamental flaws of EMU since Germany is at an entirely place in the deform structure, with unemployment at 20-year lows of 5.5pc.

What is needed to save the South must endanger the North. Germany would overheat, pushing its inflation to 4pc or 5pc until Bild Zeitung erupts in Teutonic fury. It is impossible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives.

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The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail because jihadists imprisoned there were using them not for prayer but to communicate incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had seized the books, had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve the books when the situation was brought to their attention.

Of course, these facts may not become widely known, because no one is supposed to mention the main significance of what has happened here. First, as usual, Muslims ”” not al-Qaeda terrorists, but ordinary, mainstream Muslims ”” are rioting and murdering over the burning (indeed, the inadvertent burning) of a book…

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….Bloomberg News reported last week that “the U.S. is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency. … Domestic oil output is the highest in eight years. The U.S. is producing so much natural gas that, where the government warned four years ago of a critical need to boost imports, it now may approve an export terminal.” As a result, “the U.S. has reversed a two-decade-long decline in energy independence, increasing the proportion of demand met from domestic sources over the last six years to an estimated 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011.” This transformation could make the U.S. the world’s top energy producer by 2020, raise more tax revenue, free us from worrying about the Middle East, and, if we’re smart, build a bridge to a much cleaner energy future.

All of this is good news, but it will come true at scale only if these oil and gas resources can be extracted in an environmentally sustainable manner. This can be done right, but we need a deal between environmentalists and the oil and gas industry to lock it in ”” now.

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A grenade thrown by Afghan protesters wounded at least six American service members in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials said, as new details emerged in the investigation of the shooting death of two American officers within the Interior Ministry building the day before.

Rioting continued across the country on Sunday as anger over the burning of Korans by the American military continued unabated, putting the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States on shaky new ground. At least one Afghan was killed in clashes with the Afghan police.

A few details of the killing within the Interior Ministry were emerging, although many reports offered conflicting views of what had happened. According to three Afghan security officials familiar with the case, the main suspect was Abdul Saboor, who was said to have worked in the ministry for more than a year as a driver. The two American officers who were killed were shot in the head and the pistol used to kill them was equipped with a silencer, the officials said.

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The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms reports that Iranian authorities’ reaffirmed a death sentence for Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani for the sole reason of his refusal to recant his Christian faith. This action is yet another shocking breach of Iran’s international obligations, its own constitution, and stated religious values. The United States stands in solidarity with Pastor Nadarkhani, his family, and all those who seek to practice their religion without fear of persecution””a fundamental and universal human right. The trial and sentencing process for Pastor Nadarkhani demonstrates the Iranian government’s total disregard for religious freedom, and further demonstrates Iran’s continuing violation of the universal rights of its citizens. The United States calls upon the Iranian authorities to immediately lift the sentence, release Pastor Nadarkhani, and demonstrate a commitment to basic, universal human rights, including freedom of religion. The United States renews its calls for people of conscience and governments around the world to reach out to Iranian authorities and demand Pastor Nadarkhani’s immediate release.

A gunman killed two American military advisers with shots to the back of the head Saturday inside a heavily guarded ministry building, and NATO ordered military workers out of Afghan ministries as protests raged for a fifth day over the burning of Qurans at a U.S. army base.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack at the Interior Ministry, saying it was retaliation for the Quran burnings, after the two U.S. servicemen ”” a lieutenant and colonel and a major ”” were found dead on their office floor, Afghan and western officials said. The top commander of U.S. and NATO forces recalled all international military personnel from the ministries, an unprecedented action in the decade-long war…[which] highlights [the] growing friction between Afghans and their foreign partners at a critical juncture in the war.

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Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran….

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Iran dramatically boosted its production of a purer form of nuclear fuel in recent months, with much of the increased output coming from a newly opened plant built inside a mountain bunker, U.N. officials said Friday, further exacerbating worries about Iran’s march toward nuclear-weapons capability.

The finding, in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, showed a nearly 50 percent jump since the fall in Iran’s stockpile of a kind of highly enriched uranium that is closer to weapons-grade than the type normally used in nuclear power plants.

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…. the world should [not] just let Iran get the bomb. The government will soon be starved of revenues, because of an oil embargo. Sanctions are biting, the financial system is increasingly isolated and the currency has plunged in value. Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders. Meanwhile, political change is sweeping across the Middle East. The regime in Tehran is divided and it has lost the faith of its people. Eventually, popular resistance will spring up as it did in 2009. A new regime brought about by the Iranians themselves is more likely to renounce the bomb than one that has just witnessed an American assault.

Is there a danger that Iran will get a nuclear weapon before that happens? Yes, but bombing might only increase the risk. Can you stop Iran from getting a bomb if it is determined to have one? Not indefinitely, and bombing it might make it all the more desperate. Short of occupation, the world cannot eliminate Iran’s capacity to gain the bomb. It can only change its will to possess one. Just now that is more likely to come about through sanctions and diplomacy than war.

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The book seems to suggest that you think African-American kids have lost touch with the struggles of their forebears. Do you?

Absolutely. They came into a world where, after these battles had been fought, they have a lot more opportunities and the ability to see themselves as being able to go anywhere and do anything. We have to maintain continuity by giving them the history of what the struggle was all about….

Is the U.S. in a postracial era in professional sports?

I don’t think we’ll ever be postracial, because of the fear and anxiety of dealing with the other ”” people who aren’t like you. But the ability of racism to distort and corrode our society has become a lot less.

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Sadly, the transitional government in Egypt today appears determined to shoot itself in both feet.

On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now ”” after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution ”” these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.

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European leaders have approved their latest aid package for Greece, raising hopes that the worst phase of the sovereign debt crisis is over and a persistent source of stress on global markets has been removed.

But Greece’s 130 billion euro ($172 billion) bailout highlights the weaknesses in Europe’s response to the crisis, some analysts say. The worry is that these problems could flare up and undermine recovery efforts in countries like Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

“I don’t want to be a Cassandra, but the idea that it’s over is an illusion,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University and co-author of “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” “I am amazed by the short-term psychology in the market.”

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The Obama administration will propose lowering the top income-tax rate for corporations to 28% from 35% but would raise overall tax revenue by eliminating dozens of popular deductions in an effort to restructure the corporate tax code.

The proposal, which will be announced Wednesday, would lower the “effective” tax rate on manufacturers to “no more than 25%,” according to a senior administration official, down from the current average rate of about 32%. It raises taxes on oil and gas companies that would lose many large deductions and subsidies.

The plan would require U.S. companies operating overseas to pay””for the first time””a minimum tax rate on their foreign earnings.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross says it is in talks with “all those concerned” in Syria’s conflict to negotiate a ceasefire.

The group says it wants to negotiate a brief truce in the most affected areas to allow it to deliver aid packages.

Correspondents say the fact that the ICRC has spoken publicly about the negotiations shows just how concerned it is by the situation in Syria.

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The mood is growing surly in the south of Europe as austerity measures take hold. With unemployment at 20 percent in some countries ”“ and youth unemployment as high as 50 percent ”“ warnings are growing sharper about a troubling rise of populist feeling….

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