Kirolos Andraws had every reason to be excited about the January uprising in his native Egypt, figuring democracy would bring hope for young people like him.

Then one day in February, says Mr. Andraws, a gang of thugs beat him and told him, “you deserve to die.” His offense, he says: refusing to convert to Islam.

In late March, Mr. Andraws, a 23-year- old engineer, used a tourist visa to board an Egyptair flight for New York City. He let a room in a friend’s apartment, hired an immigration lawyer and applied for asylum. He has survived mainly on wages and tips from jobs as a cook, cashier and delivery man.

Read it all.

A United States military investigation has concluded that checks and balances devised to prevent cross-border mishaps with Pakistan failed to avert a deadly NATO airstrike last month in part because American officials did not trust Pakistan enough to give it detailed information about American troop locations in Afghanistan.

A report by the inquiry concluded that mistakes by both American and Pakistani troops led to airstrikes against two Pakistani posts on the Afghan border that killed 26 Pakistani troops. But two crucial findings ”” that the Pakistanis fired first at a joint Afghan-American patrol and that they kept firing even after the Americans tried to warn them that they were shooting at allied troops ”” were likely to further anger Pakistan and plunge the already tattered relationship between the United States and Pakistan to new depths.

In a statement and at a news conference here on Thursday, the Defense Department said that “inadequate coordination by U.S. and Pakistani military officers” and “incorrect mapping information” that NATO had provided to the Pakistani authorities capped a chain of errors that caused the debacle.

Read it all.

“Congress’s point of view is that we may be running a risk that this will increase the price of oil but that compared to [the risk of ] Israeli or U.S. military strikes on Iran or a nuclear-armed Iran, the oil market impact of these sanctions will pale in comparison,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Energy analyst Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says there are no easy answers.

“There are only trade-offs, and many of the trade-offs are difficult ones,” Yergin says.

Read or listen to it all.

Kim Jong Il, the dictator who used fear and isolation to maintain power in North Korea and his nuclear weapons to menace his neighbors and threaten the U.S., has died, North Korean state television reported early Monday.

His death opens a new and potentially dangerous period of transition and instability for North Korea and northeast Asia. Mr. Kim in September 2010 tapped the youngest of his three sons, Kim Jong Eun, to succeed him, and North Korean state television on Monday said the younger Mr. Kim will lead the country.

Read it all.

One wishes that financial investors were made of the same stuff as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. With virtually the entire world convinced that the euro zone has not done enough to save the common currency, Merkel remains stoic in the face of demands to erect a gigantic firewall. On Thursday, she ruled out increasing the size of the permanent euro backstop fund, the European Stability Mechanism, beyond the currently planned €500 billion ($648.5 billion).

“The German government has always made it clear that the European debt crisis is not to be solved with a single blow,” she told German parliamentarians one day earlier. She said that overcoming the debt crisis would take years and made a plea for patience and endurance.

It would appear, however, that not many are listening. This week has seen several indications that financial markets are by no means impressed with the results of last week’s European Union summit….

Read it all.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta landed in the Iraqi capital on Thursday for the ceremony officially ending the military mission here and closing out a bloody and controversial chapter of American relations with the Islamic world.

Pentagon officials said Mr. Panetta would thank all American service members who served here since the 2003 invasion, and would laud them for “the remarkable progress we have seen here in Baghdad and across this country.”

Mr. Panetta also was expected to note that the American effort “helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to this country’s future generations.”

Read it all.

One of the German Social Democrat opposition leaders, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also told the Bundestag that the summit had been a failure. “The fiscal pact is only an illusory giant ”” from far away it looks very big but if you come close, the breakthrough is really very small,” he said. “We used to have a debt crisis but after the summit we added a veritable constitutional crisis. What we have now is more instability and a further complicated structure in Europe.”Adding to signs of the economic damage, the respected Ifo Institute cut its forecast for German growth in 2012 by half to 0.4 per cent and warned Europe’s biggest economy could slide into recession if the debt turmoil is not quelled.

In theory the incipient rescue plan is supported by 26 European nations, with Britain the only exception. But other countries outside the eurozone have also cast doubts, saying they do not yet know if they can fully sign up. Earlier this week Petr Necas, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, said that the deal was “not much more than a blank sheet of paper”.

Michael Noonan, Ireland’s Finance Minister, said on a visit to London yesterday that Ireland may need to hold a referendum on the EU treaty, pointing to barriers within the euro area itself.

Read it all (requires subscription).

With the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq in its final days, President Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will meet at the White House Monday to discuss the next phase of the relationship between their countries.

They will have plenty to discuss.

The withdrawal of all American troops on Dec. 31 marks the end of a nearly nine-year war that has been deeply divisive in both the U.S. and Iraq. While Obama and al-Maliki have pledged to maintain strong ties, the contours of the partnership between Washington and Baghdad remain murky, especially with Iran eager to assert influence over neighboring Iraq. And serious questions remain about Iraq’s capacity to stabilize both its politics and security.

Read it all.

Iran will not return a U.S. surveillance drone captured by its armed forces, a senior commander of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard said Sunday.

Gen. Hossein Salami, deputy head of the Guard, said in remarks broadcast on state television that the violation of Iran’s airspace by the U.S. drone was a “hostile act” and warned of a “bigger” response. He did not elaborate on what Tehran might do.

Read it all.

We Jjouranlists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this… [past Friday] the European Union split in a fundamental way.

In an effort to stabilise the euro zone, France, Germany and 21 other countries have decided to draft their own treaty to impose more central control over national budgets. Britain and three others have decided to stay out. In the coming weeks, Britain may find itself even more isolated. Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary want time to consult their parliaments and political parties before deciding on whether to join the new union-within-the-union.

So two decades to the day after the Maastricht Treaty was concluded, launching the process towards the single European currency, the EU’s tectonic plates have slipped momentously along same the fault line that has always divided it””the English Channel.

Read it all.

European leaders say 26 out of 27 EU member states have backed a tax and budget pact to tackle the eurozone debt crisis.

Only the UK has said it will not join. Prime Minister David Cameron said he had to protect key British interests, including its financial markets.

The 17 countries that use the euro have all agreed to the deal.

Read it all.

The European Union suffered the most damaging split in its 54 year history after David Cameron used the British veto to block eurozone treaty change after France and Germany opposed “safeguards” to protect Britain’s economy….

The Prime Minister insisted that he had been prepared to support treaty change among all 27 of the EU’s members to allow the 17-strong eurozone to take measures to tackle its debt crisis and to enforce tough new fiscal rules for the single currency.

But after 11 hours of bad-tempered talks, Mr Cameron said that he had blocked the changes because France and Germany and refused to agree to a “protocol” giving the City of London protection from a wave of EU financial service regulations related to the eurozone crisis.

Read it all.

We believe that this pivot toward Beijing is no routine oscillation in North Korean policy. The drive to normalize relations with the U.S. from 1991 to 2009 had been real, sustained and rooted in Kim Il Sung’s deep concern about the regime’s future in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was no better demonstration of the North’s approach in those years than the situation on Oct. 25, 2000 ”” the 50th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteers into the Korean War. Who was in Pyongyang on that date meeting Kim Jong Il? The Chinese defense minister? No, he was cooling his heels while Kim met with the U.S. secretary of State. That was no accident of scheduling on Pyongyang’s part; it would not happen again today.

If the paradigm shift is real, we expect the North in the near to medium term to make far less overt trouble. Less tension on the Korean peninsula? What could be wrong with that? Nothing, as long as it is understood that such tranquillity will also provide a veil for the North’s continuing pursuit of nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated delivery systems. With the onset of stability and growing Chinese-North Korean cooperation, Pyongyang may well calculate that the outside world’s focus on the North Korean nuclear program will become diffuse.

Read it all.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of being behind protests over the results of Russia’s parliamentary elections.

Mr Putin said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “set the tone for some opposition activists”.

She “gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work”, he said.

Read it all.

The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft’s sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other American rivals.

It was unclear whether the drone’s mission took it over Iran or whether it strayed there accidentally because of technical malfunctions, the official said.

Though the drone flight was a CIA operation, U.S. military personnel were involved in flying the aircraft, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy involved.

Read it all.

As the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed, Iran is getting closer to acquiring a nuclear bomb – it might be able to do so in less than two years. A Persian nuclear bomb threatens Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states as much as it does Israel. Europe and the United States also have reason to be deeply concerned.

And then there is what many had hoped would become the Arab Spring. It may be that a majority of Muslims in North Africa reject the form of democracy favoured in the West. Young Muslims have shown enormous courage in demonstrating for freedoms in the face of repression in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and the like. Yet, when relatively free elections have been conducted in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt, the Islamist parties have prevailed.

This does not mean such nations will become Islamic theocracies like Iran any time soon. It is likely that, in the short term at least, the Islamist parties will share power with other organisations, including the army.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Stephen Platten, today called on the international community to chart a new course of action in Afghanistan.

Bishop Stephen said:” It has taken us ten years to learn there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, but we appear no nearer to knowing what a just political settlement might look like, let alone how to achieve it. Next week’s international conference in Bonn offers an important opportunity, maybe our last opportunity before the withdrawal of troops in 2014, to chart a new course of action for Afghanistan and the region that is capable of securing a just and lasting peace. I’m encouraged that there is growing international acceptance, not least by our own Government, that this can only be done by including all those with a role in the conflict and representatives of all those with a legitimate interest in securing peace and reconciliation. Securing a sustainable political settlement in Afghanistan is important both for the well being of the Afghan people and for Britain’s long term security.”

Read it all.

Could civil war erupt again? How fragile is the ramshackle coalition government of Shia, Kurd and Sunni led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Iraqi leaders I spoke to say the capacity to keep the present power-sharing agreement going is far more significant for the stability of the country than any enhanced security threat from al-Qa’ida following the departure of the last American soldiers. “The leaders behave like adversaries even when they are in the same government,” says Dr Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of parliament. “It would be better to have a government and an opposition, but nobody in Iraq feels safe enough to be in the opposition.”

Despite this anxious mood, Baghdad is less dangerous than it was in 2009, and infinitely better than it was in 2007, when more than a thousand bodies were turning up in the city every month.

Read it all.

Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia….

Read it all.

For five years, I became a fervent Islamist, moving up the ladder of increasingly radical organizations. All strands of this movement descend from the teachings of Banna. He fought against the British in Palestine, trained a paramilitary organization, and members of the movement killed Egypt’s prime minister in 1948. In response, the Egyptian state had Banna assassinated a few months later.

Yet I learned, through bitter experience, that Islamism is far from unitary or coherent. In the end, I quit what’s called “the Islamic movement” because I found it too controlling of my life ”” but also because I no longer wanted to be in a perpetual state of confrontation with the West. It took me several years of travel and study in the Middle East before my mind was free of Islamist influences. I remain a follower of Islam, the religion, but not of Islamism, the political ideology.

Because I was once a part of this movement ”” whose primary goal has been the creation of Islamic governments ”” and then established the world’s first counter-radical think tank, Quilliam, in London to oppose their ideology, I have been following the Arab uprisings with more than a passing interest.

Read it all.

In recent years, Western ambassadors have quietly complained that it has become more difficult to engage the Vatican on international issues, and that Vatican diplomacy appears to be passing through a period of retrenchment.

Vatican diplomats today, they say, are highly focused on issues of religious freedom and anti-Christian persecution, but sometimes less interested in other matters. Some diplomats point to perceptions that the Vatican was not keenly engaged on Libya in the same way it had been on earlier conflicts in the Balkans or Iraq under John Paul, as an example.

Moreover, these diplomats say, the sexual abuse crisis has created a political environment in which critics of funding missions to the Vatican can wield powerful new ammunition.

Read it all.

Buddhists from around the world chose India on Wednesday as the headquarters of a new international Buddhist organization and united in their criticism of the Chinese government for trying to prevent the Dalai Lama from speaking at their meeting here in New Delhi.

It was something of a victory for India in what observers increasingly see as a contest with China to win the favor of Buddhists around the world. India is the land where Buddha gained enlightenment and taught, but China has the largest population of Buddhists today.

Read it all.

Copts and other Christian com­munities in Egypt fear that the unexpectedly large turnout in the first of the three rounds of voting in parliamentary elections will be translated into a resounding success for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Other parties representing more conserva­tive Islamists ”” Salafis and Jihadis ”” are also likely to fare better than had been thought.

“The signs are very worrying,” a schoolteacher in Alexandria, Gabriel Ghali, said. “We are all worrying about what the huge queues will mean in terms of the votes cast, and we suspect it will mean a victory for the Islamic groups ”” and that’s bad news for us.”

Tens of thousands of Christians have emigrated since the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime, and the outbreak of attacks on mem-bers of the community and their property.

Read it all.

So far, though, Germany is resisting calls to allow the European Central Bank to conduct unrestricted purchases of government bonds issued by ailing euro-zone countries in order to push their borrowing costs down to sustainable levels.

It also remains opposed to jointly issued euro bonds. Its arguments are that the measures would remove the incentive on high-debt nations to get their budgets in order, would stoke inflation and would end up costing Germany too much.

Read it all.

U.S.-Pakistani relations are “deformed,” and Washington should cease linking its Afghanistan war plans to expectations that Islamabad will target groups on its own soil, a former top American official said.

Dennis Blair, a former director of national intelligence (DNI), on Monday issued a bleak assessment of the icy partnership, which further eroded Saturday when a NATO air strike killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Read it all.

Even as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.

A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls….The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.

Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being smashed apart have risen alarmingly, thanks to financial panic, a rapidly weakening economic outlook and pigheaded brinkmanship. The odds of a safe landing are dwindling fast.

Read it all.

Of course, simply offering blank checks to the profligate is not a good solution either. But the current way the European Central Bank is acting may be the worst of all worlds. By buying government bonds while insisting it will soon stop, it is sending the message that bondholders had better sell quickly.

By contrast, if the bank made a promise to buy all the bonds that were offered to it ”” backed by its ability to print money ”” it might have to buy few bonds.

There is a real risk of moral hazard in central bank bailouts. The theory offered by Bagehot in the 19th century called for banks to make loans on securities that are of high quality and will be liquid when the panic passes, but not on low-quality securities. Telling the good from the bad during a panic is not always easy.

But we have until now assumed that a central bank would find bonds issued by its own government to be good paper, and investors could act accordingly.

Read it all.

Cpl. Heinz Arnold of Patchogue, N.Y., played “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the mighty coronation organ. With stately strides, Sgt. Francis Bohannan of Philadelphia advanced up the center aisle carrying a huge American flag. Behind him came three chaplains, the dean of the Abbey, and a Who’s Who of top American admirals, generals and diplomats. On the high altar, other soldiers draped an even larger American flag.

Their faces “plainly reflected what lay in their heart,” one reporter noted, as the visitors sang “America the Beautiful” and “Lead On O King Eternal.” The U.S. ambassador to Britain, John G. Winant, read a brief message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord. Across the uncertain ways of space and time our hearts echo those words.” The Dean of Westminster and one of the Abbey’s chaplains also spoke. “God has dealt mercifully and bountifully with us,” the chaplain said. “True, we have had our difficulties . . . but all of these trials have made us stronger to do the great tasks which have fallen to us.”

Throughout Britain, the first global Thanksgiving gave men and women from the New World and the Old World a much-needed feeling of spiritual solidarity. Let us hope that today’s overseas service men and women can have a similar impact on a troubled and divided world. Happy Thanksgiving””and our nation’s sincerest thanks”” to them all, wherever they may be deployed.

Read it all.

Read it all.

The Obama administration on Monday will name Iran, including its central bank, as a territory of “primary money laundering concern,” say senior U.S. officials, in an effort to further pressure Tehran after recent disclosures about its alleged role in terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation.

The U.S. Treasury Department won’t formally sanction Iran’s central bank, Bank Markazi, as many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are demanding.

But U.S. officials said this new action would serve as a warning to governments and businesses in Europe, Asia and Latin America to wind down their ties to Bank Markazi and their purchases of Iranian crude oil, as even tougher actions likely will be coming down the road.

Read it all.