WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Assange has been fighting extradition since he was arrested and bailed in December. He has consistently denied the allegations, made by two women in August last year.

Howard Riddle, the chief magistrate, delivered his ruling at a hearing at Belmarsh magistrates court in London. It is unlikely to be the end of the matter, however, because an appeal is expected, which would delay the final decision until the summer at the latest.

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I hope that our leaders will be modest enough to see how (and how often) what we have done or left undone in the Middle East has backfired on us. We have spent trillions of dollars and spilled untold blood in a seemingly endless effort to bring democracy, American style, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Egyptians ”” citizens of a nation with more people than Iraq and Afghanistan combined ”” won the right to write their own future in just 18 days and with little to no U.S. help.

These facts alone should humble us.
Yet I also hope that we do not trade hubris for paralysis. In the face of the ironies of Egyptian history, I must confess to being tempted to leave things elsewhere in the hands of fate or providence ”” to say with my Muslim friends, “Inshallah,” or with my Christian friends, “Thy will be done.”

But as Niebuhr reminds us, “we must exercise our power.” We must do so, however, in the absence of the hubris that characterized our past foreign policies….

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‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What’s extraordinary about this maxim is the succinct way that it captures the political dimension of Islam. Even more extraordinary is the capacity of these five pillars of faith to attract true believers. But the most remarkable thing of all is the way the Brotherhood’s motto seduces Western liberals.

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The quick pace of protests and two regime changes in the Middle East over the last month has stretched the U.S. intelligence community as it scrambles to keep up with events and maintain crucial counter-terrorism contacts, top intelligence officials said Wednesday.

Intelligence analysts had extensive reports on the tense economic and social conditions in the region, but were unable to predict when that volatile mix would ignite enough unrest to topple a government, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“We are not clairvoyant,” Clapper said.

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The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak marks a historic shift in the Middle East, away from the power structure America has leaned on for the past three decades and toward a new one still being shaped by a demographic and technological wave that the U.S. and its allies haven’t learned to control.

America’s future standing in the region now depends heavily on whether Washington’s other friends, especially those in the Persian Gulf, are more adroit than Mr. Mubarak at getting ahead of that wave.

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The three-decade long rule of Hosni Mubarak over Egypt was crumbling last night. The old dictator, confronted by an unprecedented wave of popular protests and strikes, was not prepared to go without a struggle. First he tried to divide the protesters, announcing his intention to step down as president later in the year. When that failed to disperse the crowds, Mr Mubarak is believed to have sent state-sponsored thugs to attack the pro-democracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Mr Mubarak’s allies abroad tried their best to prop up the Egyptian strongman too. Frank Wisner, the veteran diplomat sent by Barack Obama to deal with the Egyptian regime, was arguing a week ago that Mr Mubarak “must stay in office”. We learned yesterday that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pressured the White House to support Mr Mubarak, even threatening to replace any financial aid to Egypt withdrawn by the US. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, praised the Egyptian autocrat as a “wise man”.

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When the rich fall on hard times, they often end up resorting to selling the family jewels to meet their debts or living expenses.

That is the image that came to mind after hearing reports that Deutsche Borse was in advanced talks to merge with NYSE Euronext…in a seeming merger of equals. But the German exchange operator would wind up with a majority stake in the New York Stock Exchange, an icon of the city from which it takes its name.

The Big Board is the very embodiment of U.S. capitalism, and for it to fall under foreign control can’t help but be disquieting to many Americans. The takeover of this citadel of securities trading at the intersection of what may become Wall and Broad Strasse could raise a similar ruckus as the acquisition of that midtown Manhattan icon, Rockefeller Center, by Japanese investors in the late 1980s.

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The US has called on the Egyptian government to immediately lift the country’s emergency laws, which have been in place for 30 years.

Vice-President Joe Biden made the call during a telephone conversation with his Egyptian counterpart Omar Suleiman.

It came after a day of renewed anti-government protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

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Israelis are watching anxiously as anti-government protests continue in Egypt – one of the country’s only friends in the Arab world.

“Judgement Day” for President Hosni Mubarak was the full-page headline jumping from the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in Israel on Tuesday.

The implications of regime change in Egypt would be enormous here.

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Any government in which the Brotherhood has a greater role would be less supportive of U.S. interests, says David Schenker, a Middle East adviser in the Defense Department under President George W. Bush. Senior leaders of the Brotherhood have pledged to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, he says.

The organization has been a revolutionary opposition group in Egypt since its founding in the 1920s, opposing corruption and advocating a conservative form of Islam in government. It inspired al-Qaeda and the Iran-backed Palestinian group Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist group.

Over the years, radical elements of the Brotherhood have tried to initiate armed rebellion in Egypt. President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a Brotherhood cell, leading to Mubarak’s rise and a crackdown on the group

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It is now time for Mr. Mubarak, 82, to go, and President Barack Obama should say so clearly. In order to preserve an American reputation for not being just a fair-weather friend and to maintain relations with other such leaders, the United States should offer Mr. Mubarak refuge, making it clear that it is a means of helping Egyptians find a felicitous, non-violent solution.

The Egyptian army can then preserve order, as it has traditionally, until early, free and democratic elections can be held to choose Mr. Mubarak’s successor.

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The last six decades of Middle Eastern history can be neatly divided into three phases: The first began with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 revolution in Egypt, the second with the Arab world’s humiliating loss in the 1967 war with Israel and the third with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

A fourth phase likely started over the weekend in Egypt. But whether the political “reform” movement in Cairo’s streets turns out to be a positive or negative turn for the region””and for the U.S.””depends much on Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed ElBaradei and, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama. If history is any guide, it may take months, if not years, to know precisely the outcome.

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The Obama administration is ramping up pressure on President Hosni Mubarak to address the grievances of the Egyptian people and said the government’s response to protests may affect U.S. aid.

“The people of Egypt are watching the government’s actions, they have for quite some time, and their grievances have reached a boiling point and they have to be addressed,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters in Washington. The U.S. will be looking at its “assistance posture” toward Egypt, Gibbs said.

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If Egyptian unrest turns into an Egyptian revolution, the implications for the Arab world – and for Western policy in the Middle East – will be immense.

Egypt matters, in a way that tiny Tunisia – key catalyst that it has been in the current wave of protest – does not.

It matters because its destiny affects, in a range of ways, not only Arab interests but Israeli, Iranian and Western interests, too.

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The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead….

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Now there is someone new at the National Security Council who won’t be getting much sleep: He’s a former Rhodes College professor named Quintan Wiktorowicz, and he’s an expert on, among other things, how some people decide to become terrorists.

“A number of years ago, before he went into government, he did some of the most path-breaking work not only on who was susceptible to being radicalized, but most importantly, who was the most resistant to being radicalized,” says Christine Fair, an expert on terrorism and radicalization at Georgetown University. “And the findings that he came up with based upon his work really shattered some of the stereotypes we have about Muslims and radicalization.”

As part of his research, Wiktorowicz interviewed hundreds of Islamists in the United Kingdom. After compiling his interviews he came to the conclusion that ”” contrary to popular belief ”” very religious Muslims were in fact the people who ended up being the most resistant to radicalization.

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Could the yuan become a rival? China’s economy will probably surpass America’s in outright size within 20 years. It is already a bigger exporter. It is prodding firms to settle trade and even acquire foreign companies in its own currency. That is adding to a pool of “redbacks” outside its borders. These offshore yuan are, in turn, being tapped by borrowers, issuing “dim sum” bonds in Hong Kong.

But as the dollar’s history shows, economic clout is not enough without financial sophistication (see article). If foreigners are to store their wealth in yuan, they will need financial instruments that are safe, stable and easily sold. Dim sum makes for a tasty appetiser. But the main feast of China’s financial assets is onshore and off-limits, thanks to its strict capital controls. The government remains deeply reluctant to let foreigners hold, buy and sell these assets, except under tight limits. Indeed, it is barely ready to give its own people financial freedom: interest on bank deposits is capped; shares are largely owned by state entities; and bonds are chiefly held by the banks””which are, in turn, mostly owned by the state.

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China is calling President Hu Jintao’s talks with President Barack Obama successful, and says the two leaders reached “important consensus” on a wide range of issues.

Chinese newspapers Thursday carried front page pictures of President Hu with President Obama at the White House. Headlines cheered a new chapter in relations between the two countries and reports accentuated the positive news from the meeting.

An English dispatch from the official Xinhua news agency characterized Mr. Hu’s visit to Washington as “a historic masterstroke of China-U.S. diplomacy””

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When President Obama welcomed Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House on Wednesday, he was joined by a group of students from Washington, D.C.’s Yu Ying Public Charter School. It’s a Chinese-language immersion elementary school ”” the first in the nation’s capital and one of only a handful in the United States.

Interest in learning Chinese has surged in the past decade as American economic ties to China have deepened. A growing number of elementary and high schools are offering Chinese classes ”” though few teach it as intensively as Yu Ying in the northeast D.C. neighborhood of Brookland.

Housed in a former convent, the school’s 240 students alternate school days learning in entirely Chinese and English.

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Faith leaders with long-term ties to Cuban organizations are hailing a change in White House policy that reduces limits on religious travel to the island nation.

The White House announced Friday (Jan. 14) that President Obama had directed changes that include permitting religious organizations to sponsor trips through a general license. The administration also will create a general license that permits remittances to religious institutions in Cuba that support religious activities.

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…in 2007, President Hu Jintao had told the 17th Congress of the Communist Party that China needed to invest more in its soft, or attractive, power.

From the point of view of a country that was making enormous strides in economic and military power, this was a smart strategy.

By accompanying the rise of its hard economic and military power with efforts to make itself more attractive, China aimed to reduce the fear and tendencies to balance Chinese power that might otherwise grow among its neighbours.

But China’s performance has been just the opposite, and China has had a bad year and a half in foreign policy.

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The sudden arrival of Mr. Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from the time he was 19 until he was forced to flee by mass protests in 1986, threatened to further convulse a country that is struggling to recover from the earthquake, a lingering cholera epidemic, the political uncertainty stemming from last year’s contested presidential election and an epidemic of violent crime.

Mr. Sterlin said he did not know how long Mr. Duvalier, who has been living in exile near Paris, planned to stay in Haiti, or if he planned to meet with Haiti’s president, René Préval. An aide said Mr. Préval was among those surprised by Mr. Duvalier’s arrival.

A friend said that Mr. Duvalier would stay for three or four days, but that he would eventually like to resettle in Haiti. The friend spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not Mr. Duvalier’s official representative.

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Chinese President Hu Jintao, who travels to Washington this week for a state visit after a year marked by disputes and tension with the United States, said the two countries could mutually benefit by finding “common ground” on issues from fighting terrorism and nuclear proliferation to cooperating on clean energy and infrastructure development.

“There is no denying that there are some differences and sensitive issues between us,” Hu said in written answers to questions from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He said “We both stand to gain from a sound China-U.S. relationship, and lose from confrontation.”

To enhance what he called “practical cooperation” on a wide range of issues, Hu urged an increase in dialogues and exchanges and more “mutual trust.” He said, “We should abandon the zero-sum Cold War mentality” and, in what seemed like an implicit rejection of U.S. criticisms of China’s internal affairs, said the two should “respect each other’s choice of development path.”

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The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex ”” and ingenious ”” than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

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However, this is only one ”“ misleading ”“ side of the story. There are moments ”“ moments of crisis for the hegemonic discourse ”“ when one should take the risk of provoking the disintegration of appearances. Such a moment was described by the young Marx in 1843. In ”˜Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, he diagnosed the decay of the German ancien regime in the 1830s and 1840s as a farcical”‹ repetition of the tragic fall of the French ancien regime. The French regime was tragic ”˜as long as it believed and had to believe in its own justification’. The German regime ”˜only imagines that it believes in itself and demands that the world imagine the same thing. If it believed in its own essence, would it ”¦ seek refuge in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather only the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead.’ In such a situation, shame is a weapon: ”˜The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicising it.’

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame ”“ our shame for tolerating such power over us ”“ is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

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Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

The factory closing in Devens, Mass., which Evergreen announced earlier this week, has set off political recriminations and finger-pointing in Massachusetts. And it comes just as President Hu Jintao of China is scheduled for a state visit next week to Washington, where the agenda is likely to include tensions between the United States and China over trade and energy policy.

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For now, Beijing wields enough power to keep the US in check in the Pacific and to discourage Taiwan from relying too heavily on American support. In the future, the Pentagon believes that the PLA could extend further into the Pacific, using its fleet to control shipping lines and oil concessions. The “pace and scale” of the PLA’s modernisation has been “broad and sweeping”, the Pentagon said. But, for now, China’s modern army “remains untested”.

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Facing a backlash from conservative groups, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ordered changes to a proposal to remove the terms “mother” and “father” from records of overseas births.

“With Secretary Clinton’s input, we will be revising the form to retain the existing designation of mother and father, in addition to the designation of parent,” said Rosemary Macray, a spokeswoman for the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.

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Pope Benedict XVI urged Pakistan to reverse its blasphemy laws, saying Monday they were a pretext for violence against non-Muslims, and demanded that all governments do more so Christians can practice their faith without fear.

Benedict issued one of his most pointed appeals yet for religious freedom in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, saying it was a fundamental human right that must be protected in law and in practice.

Benedict has frequently denounced the wave of attacks against Christians in the Middle East and warned of the threat that religious intolerance poses to world security. On Monday, he catalogued a wave of injustices against the faithful from China to Nigeria in pressing governments to take action.

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Images and witness accounts posted online Tuesday appeared to show that China’s stealth fighter prototype had made its first test flight, even as Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense Secretary who has downplayed China’s stealth aircraft capability, was meeting Chinese civilian leaders in Beijing.

The J-20, which has been undergoing runway tests for the last two weeks or so, took off from an airstrip at the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute just before 1 p.m. local time and flew for about 20 minutes, according to several witness accounts posted by Chinese bloggers.

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