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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Iran’s government ordered a halt to oil exports to Britain and France on Sunday, in what may be only an initial response to the European Union decision to cut off Iranian oil imports and freeze central bank assets beginning in July.

Britain and France depend little on Iranian oil, however, so their targeting may be a mostly symbolic act, a function of the strong positions Paris and London have taken in trying to halt Iranian nuclear enrichment and bring pressure to bear on Syria, one of Tehran’s closest allies.

Tehran may also be reluctant, when its economy has been damaged by existing sanctions, to deprive itself of revenues from its larger European customers. At the same time, it may be seeking to divide the 27-nation European Union between those who depend on Iranian oil and those who do not

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Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was the payment.

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.

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China’s defense budget will double by 2015, making it more than the rest of the Asia Pacific region’s combined, according to a report from IHS Jane’s, a global think tank specializing in security issues.

Beijing’s military spending will reach $238.2 billion in 2015, compared with $232.5 billion for rest of the region, according to the report. That would also be almost four times the expected defense budget of Japan, the next biggest in the region, in 2015, the report said.

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Chinese officials denied a visa to a top State Department envoy and refused to meet with her to discuss issues of religious freedom days before this week’s high-profile visit to Washington by China’s vice president, according to rights advocates and others.

Suzan Johnson Cook, the U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom, was scheduled to travel to China on Feb. 8, according to several rights advocates who were invited to brief her ahead of the visit. But as the date drew near, Chinese leaders refused to grant her meetings with government officials.

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Leaders of the Arab League called for a joint Arab-UN peacekeeping force for Syria yesterday after a meeting in Cairo, hours after the controversial head of the organisation’s Syrian observer mission resigned.

Mohammed al-Dabi, the Sudanese general who faced a torrent of criticism from rights groups and activists for his apparent failure to acknowledge violence by the regime, stepped down as Arab ministers attempted to revive the mission under a new mandate.

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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Berlin republic is a European Germany, in the rich, positive sense in which the great novelist had come to use the term. It is free, civilized, democratic, law-bound, socially and environmentally conscious.

It’s far from perfect, obviously, but as good as any other big country in Europe ”“ and the best Germany we’ve ever had.

Yet because of the crisis of the euro zone this European Germany finds itself, unwillingly, at the centre of a German Europe. No one can seriously doubt that Germany is calling the shots in the euro zone. The reason there is a fiscal compact treaty agreed by 25 European Union member states is that Berlin wanted it. Desperate, impoverished Greeks are being told “do their homework” by Germans. More extraordinary still, the German Chancellor is now telling French voters who to vote for in their own presidential election, through a series of campaign appearances with President Nicolas Sarkozy. Everyone says Europe is being led by “Merkozy” but the reality is more like “Merkelzy.”

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Eliat, Israel–Vacationers in this glittering holiday city by the Israeli-Egyptian border, stroll along a seaside promenade trying to forget their nation’s troubles.

“We try not to think about politics too much,” said Nikhama Prat, pushing her 3-year-old son in a carriage along the wood-planked walkway. “There is always something happening with Israel. We’re threatened all the time.”
In a country endemic with strife, there are mixed feelings among Israelis over whether growing threats from Iran, or immediate localized issues, are of greatest concern.

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Western commentators typically attribute such behavior to Putin’s personal paranoia or to attempts to rekindle the nation’s wounded pride and assert Russia’s superpower status. Look a little closer, however, and Russia’s actions seem motivated more by calculated — albeit sometimes miscalculated — realpolitik than by psychological impulses.

First, strategic interests are at stake. In Tartus, Syria hosts the sole remaining Russian naval base on the Mediterranean, currently being refurbished by 600 Russian technicians after long disuse. To have to give up this Middle Eastern beachhead would be a shame, as far as the Russians are concerned.

Second, although limited, Russia has real commercial interests in Syria.

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The Egyptian government intends to prosecute at least 40 people, including some U.S. citizens, as part of an investigation into nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funding, state media reported Sunday.

The announcement came a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned the Egyptian Foreign Ministry that failure to quickly resolve the probe could jeopardize the more than $1.3 billion Egypt expects to get this year in U.S. aid.

“We are very clear that there are problems that arise from this situation that can impact all the rest of our relationship in Egypt,” Clinton told reporters while attending an international conference in Munich in which she met with her Egyptian counterpart. “We don’t want that.”

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as a “travesty” Russia and China’s veto of a UN resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown against anti-government protesters.

Speaking in Bulgaria, Mrs Clinton said efforts outside the world body to help Syria’s people should be redoubled.

The US, she said, would work with “friends of a democratic Syria” to support opponents of Syria’s president.

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Five months ago, in a grand auditorium and beneath a cinema-sized screen scrolling images of starving children, Africa’s leaders gathered to promise an end to a growing food crisis.

Aid appeals were being revised upwards weekly, highlighting just how severe the situation had gotten: By the time of that meeting, the first ever famine fund-raising conference by Africa for Africa, the amount needed to keep 12 million people from dying for a lack of food was nearing $1.5 billion.

What aid agencies call “traditional donors” ”“ among them the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, The World Bank ”“ were, belatedly, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the United Nations’ appeal account. By the close of the meeting, at the African Union (AU) headquarters in Ethiopia in August, more than $350 million had been pledged from the governments of a third of the continent’s countries and the African Development Bank. Until then Africa’s own contribution to keep its starving citizens alive had been paltry….

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In a major milestone toward ending a decade of war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said on Wednesday that American forces would step back from a combat role there as early as mid-2013, more than a year before all American troops are scheduled to come home.

Mr. Panetta cast the decision as an orderly step in a withdrawal process long planned by the United States and its allies, but his comments were the first time that the United States had put a date on stepping back from its central role in the war. The defense secretary’s words reflected the Obama administration’s eagerness to bring to a close the second of two grinding ground wars it inherited from the Bush administration.

Promising the end of the American combat mission in Afghanistan next year would also give Mr. Obama a certain applause line in his re-election stump speech this year.

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President Obama’s public acknowledgment of the CIA’s secret drone campaign in Pakistan puts new pressure on the administration to defend the policy openly. That’s a welcome development. The president should now be equally forthcoming about the rationale for the targeted killings of American citizens.

In an interview conducted by Google and YouTube on Monday, Obama defended the use of drones as “judicious” and added that “obviously a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA,” Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas. An administration official told CNN that the president’s remarks about the secret program were not a “slip-up.” Nevertheless, on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney refused to discuss the drone program, withholding comment on “supposed covert programs.”

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Thirty-five Ethiopian Christians, 29 of them women, face deportation from Saudi Arabia for “illicit mingling” after police raided a private prayer gathering, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.

The New York-based watchdog said the women were subjected to “unwarranted strip search,” while the men were beaten and insulted as “unbelievers”.

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A defiant Russia resisted intense pressure from the West and several Arab countries yesterday for a strong United Nations resolution demanding President Bashar al-Assad steps aside to end the political violence in Syria and speed a transition to democracy.

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Alain Juppé, the French Foreign Minister and several Arab ministers were in New York for a Security Council meeting as fighting between government troops and regime opponents worsened.

However, as negotiations on the final text continued, there was no sign that Moscow, Syria’s most important ally, would consent to any wording that called on Mr Assad to go or that authorised military action.

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There has been a pronounced decline in the number of wars and the deadliness of war in the world. One expert, John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University, writes: “We may be reaching a point where war – in both its international and civil varieties – ceases, or nearly ceases to exist, a remarkable development that has attracted little notice.”

Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker says that it “may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history”. He writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature: “We may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”

So what is the evidence so far? Let’s start with recent history, where the data is clearest….

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If there was one recurring theme during Nicolas Sarkozy’s live prime-time television interview last night, it was the French president’s obsession with Germany. In an appearance that lasted just over an hour, watched by a massive 16m viewers, Mr Sarkozy repeatedly held Germany up as a model for France, which is still reeling from the loss of its triple-A credit rating at the hands of Standard & Poor’s earlier this month.

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[A]..mix of political control and market reform has yielded huge benefits. China’s rise over the past two decades has been more impressive than any burst of economic development ever. Annual economic growth has averaged 10% a year and 440m Chinese have lifted themselves out of poverty””the biggest reduction of poverty in history.

Yet for China’s rise to continue, the model cannot remain the same. That’s because China, and the world, are changing.

China is weathering the global crisis well. But to sustain a high growth rate, the economy needs to shift away from investment and exports towards domestic consumption. That transition depends on a fairer division of the spoils of growth. At present, China’s banks shovel workers’ savings into state-owned enterprises, depriving workers of spending power and private companies of capital. As a result, just when some of the other ingredients of China’s boom, such as cheap land and labour, are becoming scarcer, the government is wasting capital on a vast scale. Freeing up the financial system would give consumers more spending power and improve the allocation of capital.

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A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Some senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering to field unarmed surveillance drones in the future in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

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The Pentagon budget will actually shrink next year, for the first time since 1998, under a proposal released by the Obama administration that will cut the size of the Army and Marine Corps, trim the number of fighter aircraft and ships, and seek congressional approval for another round of military base closures.

The cuts are part of a broader effort by the Pentagon to decrease its projected spending by $487 billion over the next 10 years, in accordance with a deficit-reduction deal President Obama reached with Congress in August.

The budget is also an attempt to realign the Pentagon’s accounts with Obama’s new military strategy, which he unveiled this month and which seeks to “rebalance” the armed forces toward Asia while maintaining their presence in the Middle East, principally to deter Iran.

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Iran has said an oil embargo adopted by European Union foreign ministers over the country’s nuclear programme is “unfair” and “doomed to fail”.

The measures would not prevent Iran’s “progress for achieving its basic rights”, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said.

The sanctions ban all new oil contracts with Iran and freeze the assets of Iran’s central bank in the EU.

The EU currently buys about 20% of Iran’s oil exports.

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Drone strikes rely on fallible intelligence from local informants, which leads to errors. The price is innocent people’s lives. It also sets a dangerous international precedent – that the secret extrajudicial execution by one country, to kill people in another country, with minimal oversight and no judicial process, is acceptable. This is the policy being carried out by drones.

At a very basic level, it is difficult to gauge whether the policy actually works. Supporters claim the policy has successfully disrupted terrorist networks. Yet suicide attacks in Pakistan and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq have often intensified following the drone deaths of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

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The President of the Palestinian Authority has met with leaders of the Christian Churches of Britain in London following his talks with the British government over the stalled Middle East peace process.

The meeting between Mahmoud Abbas and Dr. Rowan Williams comes at a nadir in Anglo-Israeli relations and on the same day the Israeli Foreign Ministry chided Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as being grossly “ill informed” about the conflict in the Middle East.

According to a statement released after the 17 Jan 2012, President Abbas told the church leaders that Israel and the Palestinians must resume peace talks. The Arab Spring provided a “rare opportunity” to bring peace to the region, the Palestinian leader said.

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Commander [Layne] McDowell banked and aligned his jet’s nose with the canyon’s northeastern end. Then he followed his wingmen’s lead. He dived, pulled level at 5,000 feet and accelerated down the canyon’s axis at 620 miles per hour, broadcasting his proximity with an extended engine roar.

In the lexicon of close air support, his maneuver was a “show of presence” ”” a mid-altitude, nonlethal display intended to reassure ground troops and signal to the Taliban that the soldiers were not alone. It reflected a sharp shift in the application of American air power, de-emphasizing overpowering violence in favor of sorties that often end without munitions being dropped.

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

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We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen ”” with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground ”” but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude ”” just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

Environmentalists and Nebraska politicians say that the route TransCanada proposed might threaten the state’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region. But TransCanada has been willing to tweak the route, in consultation with Nebraska officials, even though a government analysis last year concluded that the original one would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” Surely the Obama administration didn’t have to declare the whole project contrary to the national interest ”” that’s the standard State was supposed to apply ”” and force the company to start all over again.

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Pakistan’s civilian government fired its Defense Secretary Wednesday in a rare show of defiance against the country’s powerful Army, which had earlier publicly rebuked Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and ignited speculation the government may fall.

Retired Lt. Gen. Naeem Khalid Lodhi, a senior bureaucrat seen as close to the Army, was dismissed by the government for “gross misconduct and illegal action.” He was replaced by a bureaucrat close to the prime minister.

It’s not yet clear whether Pakistan’s powerful Army will be sufficiently moved to launch a coup and directly rule the country as it has done for approximately half of Pakistan’s 65 year history. But if Mr. Gilani’s defiance pays off, that could indicate a boost for the country’s democratic institutions.

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Iran’s rulers are feeling the heat. The Islamic Republic was forced to prop up its currency on Jan. 4, just days after the U.S. imposed tough new sanctions to goad it into abandoning its nuclear weapons program. A European curb on Iranian crude imports would add to pressure on Tehran ahead of elections in March.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a problem. But more sanctions may not be a solution. If China doesn’t co-operate, they may just end up distorting oil markets.

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[Nine months after the rising protests against Mubarak]…the Brotherhood had reclaimed its status as Egypt’s most powerful political force following decades of suppression. In the country’s first free parliamentary elections, its newly created Freedom and Justice party won more than 35 per cent of the vote in the first round, and slightly more in December’s second round.

Even more worrying for those hoping the Arab world’s largest nation would adopt a liberal, pro-western face, fellow Islamists from the puritanical Salafi movement emerged with more than 25 per cent, a score likely to be confirmed in the third and final round of voting in January.

“This is the real Egyptian revolution,” says Jon Alterman of the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of the international observers at the Egyptian elections. “In February, the military removed Hosni Mubarak. This is the revolution that reorients power in Egypt.”

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