In the Persian calendar, 22 Bahman has a revered place as the anniversary of the overthrow of the Western-backed monarchy by the world’s first Islamic revolution. Tomorrow marks 31 years since that event and in Tehran the preparations are underway. Bunting and flags are strung across the streets, and loudspeakers have been fixed to lamp posts to relay speeches which, according to tradition, should be met by mass roars of “Death to America” from crowds gathered beneath the city’s Azadi monument.

This year, however, as Iran’s nuclear standoff with the West escalates to crisis levels, the opposition is planning to hijack the annual “celebrations” for its biggest show of strength in months. Pro-government forces will also be out in force ”“ as they were yesterday, protesting outside European embassies ”“ and the pieces are in place for a volatile confrontation. No one doubts that the security forces have been readying their weapons and the prisons, clearing space for “rioters”, and the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has threatened they will be given a “punch in the mouth” if they dare to protest.

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Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordered the nation’s atomic energy agency on Sunday to begin producing a special form of uranium that can be used to power a medical reactor in Tehran, but that could also move the country much closer to possessing fuel usable in nuclear weapons.

The announcement Sunday came after several days of conflicting signals from Mr. Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials about whether they were ready to reopen negotiations about giving up much of their country’s fuel in exchange for enriched uranium from another country. The exchange would allow Iran to meet some of its energy needs, but would ease fears in the West because the fuel sent to Tehran would be in a form that would be very difficult to use in a bomb.

The deal fell apart when it was rejected by the leadership in Tehran.

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Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

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Western diplomats at the UN are working on the first stages of a resolution that proposes further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme.

The measures include expanding travel bans and asset freezes on people connected with the nuclear industry.

The move comes despite Iran’s apparent acceptance of a deal to send most of its low-enriched uranium abroad in return for research reactor fuel rods.

Washington has called on Iran to match its words with actions.

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Lamenting the dwindling number of Christians in the Middle East, the region’s Catholic bishops called for greater religious freedom in Muslim countries, denounced Islamic fundamentalism, and criticized Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

The statements came in a document, released at the Vatican on Tuesday (Jan. 19), laying out topics of discussion for a special synod of Middle Eastern bishops, to take place at the Vatican in October.

Written by a committee of bishops, most of them members of the Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome, the document noted the exodus of Christians from the Middle East over the last century, and especially in recent years.

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Benedict XVI says peace in the Holy Land is possible, and that it hinges on Israelis and Palestinians recognizing their mutual right to a homeland.

The Pope took up this theme today when he delivered his traditional New Year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See.

The Holy Father’s address for 2010 centered on the issue of respect for creation and the environment, the same theme he highlighted in his Jan. 1 message for the World Day of Peace.

The Pontiff recalled how during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land last May, he “urgently appealed to the Israelis and the Palestinians to dialogue and to respect each others’ rights.”

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A new U.S.-led initiative to revive Middle East peace talks faces steep hurdles even before it’s launched, with Israelis and Palestinians resisting new concessions despite a fresh application of American diplomacy.

President Barack Obama’s first efforts at brokering Middle East peace bore no fruit last year, and the White House now has crafted a two-year plan under which Israelis and Palestinians would hold regular, intense meetings to reach a final peace agreement.

Obama is sending his Mideast envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, on a series of trips to the region and to Europe starting next week. He’s also enlisting the help of Arab allies, whose representatives are filing through Washington.

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Seven Coptic Christians, including two priests, were sentenced to prison for allegedly being involved in a brawl in connection with a dispute over the purchase of a property by the Coptic Orthodox Bishopric of Delga and Deir Mawas, 270 KM from Cairo.

According to the Assyrian International News Agency the Misdemeanor Court in Mallawi upheld a verdict passed by the First Instance Court in April, 2007. The Rev Maximos Talat and Rev Bolah Nassif – priest of St George’s Church were sentence to one week in prison and fined 200 Egyptian Pounds, “based on claims made by the ‘aggressors’ and without any legal basis,” according to the their lawyer, Amgad Lamei.

In 2007 an adjacent property was legally acquired by the Bishopric from the Selim family. The dispute ensued after another neighbour, the Shaker family, said they have “right of first refusal” as they are cousins of the Selims, and subsequently occupied the property. The Bishopric obtained an eviction order from the Attorney General.

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Iran set a one-month deadline Saturday for the West to accept its counterproposal to a U.N.-drafted nuclear plan and warned that otherwise it will produce reactor fuel at a higher level of enrichment on its own.

The warning was a show of defiance and a hardening of Iran’s stance over its nuclear program, which the West fears masks an effort to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran insists its program is only for peaceful purposes, such as electricity production, and says it has no intention of making a bomb.

“We have given them an ultimatum. There is one month left and that is by the end of January,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, speaking on state television.

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What has happened, however, makes next year more fraught with challenges and danger than ever in dealing with Iran.

First, Iran was caught (again) cheating and lying about its nuclear program, especially when U.S. and other intelligence agencies revealed a new undeclared uranium enrichment facility near Qom, an installation the Iranians had tried to keep secret. So persistent has been the Iranian policy of deceit and of on-again, off-again co-operation that Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost his legendary patience with Iran and denounced the country’s approach.

Second, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election was obviously a rigged affair. The result has been an even greater grip on government and the economy of the Revolutionary Guards and the special police, the Basij, both under the control of the Supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A mixture of political thuggery, institutionalized corruption, religious inflexibility and a morbid suspicion of the West now permeates the Iranian government.

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The ongoing Christian flight from the Middle East was high on the agenda of the Vatican’s secretary for the relations with states, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, when I met with him recently in Rome.

The lengthy exodus of ancient Christian congregations from the greater Middle East’s last redoubts of religious pluralism is accelerating. Terrorism, conflict, and the rise of intolerant Islamism are to blame, Vatican officials explain. There is a real fear that the light of Christian communities that was enkindled personally by the apostles of Jesus Christ could be extinguished in this vast region that includes the Holy Land.

This trend could be reversed or at least halted, but probably not without Western help. Thus far, the rapid erosion of Middle Eastern Christianity has drawn little notice from the outside world.

Pope Benedict XVI, however, is planning a special synod of Roman Catholic bishops next October to discuss this crisis and to promote greater ecumenical unity in the Middle East. The hope for the synod, as reported by the Catholic news agency Zenit, is that “new generations must come to know the great patrimony of faith and witness in the different churches” of this region.

The greater Middle East, of course, holds profound theological significance for all Christians. Broad Christian engagement may be the best hope for the survival of these ancient Middle Eastern churches — the Copts and Chaldeans, the Maronites and Melkites, the Latin Rite Catholics, the Armenians, the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and others.

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As a priest led prayers for a few dozen worshipers inside St. Joseph Chaldean Church here on Sunday, Iraqi police officers stood guard outside. They blocked the street to traffic and frisked those who entered for explosive belts.

At churches in Baghdad this week, Christians are being asked for identification to determine if they have names that security force members recognize as Christian. Some churches around the northern city of Mosul are digging in, surrounding their buildings with giant earthen berms to prevent car bombers from getting too close.

For Christians in Iraq, this will be a year of canceled holiday celebrations and of Christmas Masses spent under the protective watch of police officers and soldiers because of a spate of threats by extremist groups to bomb churches on Christmas Day.

“I’m very sad that we are not able to have our rituals for Christmas this year and not have a sermon, but we do not want any Christians to be harmed,” said Edward Poles, a Christian priest at Sa’a Church in Mosul, which was bombed last week, though no one was killed.

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Some of Ahmadinejad’s advisers urge him to provide Obama with a “fig leaf” to silence his domestic critics in the US. They argue that the Islamic Republic made a mistake by wrecking Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1979 when “students” raided the US Embassy in Tehran and made hostages of its diplomats. By sinking President Carter, who had been sympathetic to the revolution, the mullahs ended up with a hostile Ronald Reagan, who became the first, and so far only, US president to take military action against Iran, in 1988. Iran should not repeat that mistake by “Carterising Obama”, some Ahmadinejad advisers insist.

Unwilling to contemplate pre-emptive war, some may believe the only alternative is pre-emptive surrender. It is not. It is still possible to raise the cost of Iran’s nuclear ambitions by fully applying the sanctions already approved, but not implemented by the UN resolution and envisaged by the IAEA’s own rules. These include tight control of exports of all dual-use material and equipment to Iran, the inspection and impounding of suspect cargos on board ships and aircraft, and the termination of Iranian access to credit facilities and banking services used for its illicit nuclear project.

The full implementation of existing resolutions would send a signal to Tehran that its “cheat-and-retreat” strategy is not cost-free.

Obama had hoped to kick this can down the road with a mixture of negotiations and symbolic gestures. The latest revelations may make it difficult to continue that tactic. What he faces is a choice between accepting Iran as a nuclear power and taking action to stop it from crossing the threshold.

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The threat of sovereign defaults, disowned state-company debts and continuing commercial real estate troubles comes amid a recovery that is extraordinarily precarious. It is based on fiscal stimulus from governments, but government debt ensures that this game has to stop at some point. It is based on the printing of money by central banks, but a combination of political backlash and inflation fears will eventually close down this game also. To rescue the global economy, governments have exacerbated the flaws responsible for making the system weak. China has too much export capacity; it is building more. China has an undervalued currency; it is weakening further. Meanwhile, the United States has a low national savings rate and is home to financial behemoths that are “too big to fail.” But the U.S. government has been forced to add to the public debt and broker consolidation in the banking business.

Given these troubles, Dubai should have been a wake-up call. Instead, global stock markets have risen since last weekend. We are witnessing the sort of rally that chart-watching traders know well: the kind where investors shrug off most bad news, so you might as well jump on the bandwagon. When this mentality sets in, prices inevitably rise too far. At the end of the trend there is usually a bubble.

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The outside world may be focused on Iran’s intensifying confrontation with the West over its nuclear program. But at home, Iranians are more concerned with an ambitious and risky new effort to overhaul the country’s troubled economy.

If it goes awry, the plan to phase out Iran’s system of state subsidies, which has existed for decades, could profoundly destabilize the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has aggressively championed change. But it could also help wean Iran from its dependence on foreign gasoline and insulate the economy from new sanctions ”” which are a strong possibility if Iran continues to defy Western pressure over its nuclear program.

The new plan has been the subject of frenzied debate in shops, blogs and homes across Iran, not to mention the Parliament. Lawmakers across the political spectrum have warned of catastrophic price shocks once subsidies are lifted. Conservatives seem deeply worried about the repercussions, with some saying the plan could lead to a crime wave, or worse. Opposition leaders like Mir Hussein Moussavi have begun hinting that the government’s failure to stem economic pain could become their new rallying cry.

What is scary [about the story of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books ”” and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes ”” this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny ”” in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan ”” a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

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Iran’s Government today announced plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants and said work would start within two months.

Each site will be the size of the existing Natanz plant with the aim of producing between 250-300 tonnes of uranium a year.

IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, says the Government ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to begin construction of five uranium enrichment sites that have already been studied and propose five other sites for future construction.

The decision was made during a Cabinet meeting headed by President Ahmadinejad on Sunday evening, IRNA said.

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Shares in London tumbled as the market opened this morning, following steep losses in Asia, as investor panic over banks’ exposure to Dubai’s growing financial problems gathered pace.

The FTSE 100 index of leading UK shares fell by 83.46 points to 5,110.67 in early trading, adding to yesterday’s loss of 170.68 points. The FTSE bounced back, to fall by 12 points to 5,182.13 after more than an hour of trading but all eyes will be on American shares when Wall Street opens later today after being shut for Thanksgiving yesterday.

Masayoshi Okamoto, head of dealing at Jujiya Securities in Tokyo, said: “I think we won’t know the full impact of Dubai until Monday after we see what happens in New York, where bank shares are likely to be hit pretty hard.”

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Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”

The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace ”” post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo ”” has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen ”” Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton ”” savvy enough to seize those moments.

Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other ”” a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

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Speaking at LaGrange College about his varied experiences in Iraq, White recalled the day his Iraqi doctor suggested stem cell treatment and said it could start the next day. White said there are 63 Iraqis with MS who also are receiving the treatment.

“All of us have improved greatly,” he said.

The Anglican clergyman talked about the danger for Christians — and everyone else — in Baghdad. “Everyone in Iraq is faring badly. Everyone is having it difficult,” he said.

“Christians do have it hard,” White said. He said 93 members of his church were killed last year. During the last year, he baptized 13 people — 11 of whom have been killed.

I have thought about that last sentence for a long time. I hope you do as well. Read it all.

If current negotiations falter, international efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program may escalate to the imposition of “crippling sanctions” or even the use of military force. A crucial question that policymakers must consider is whether such punitive measures would help or hinder the popular uprising against the Iranian regime that emerged after the country’s fraudulent June 12 presidential elections.

The so-called green movement — the color has been adopted by the opposition — poses the most serious challenge to the survivability of the Islamic Republic in its 30-year history. Few analysts doubt that if it succeeded in toppling Iran’s hard-line regime, the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program would become far more susceptible to diplomatic resolution.

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned major powers on Wednesday against intimidating Iran and said talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme was “premature”.

Putin, who many diplomats, analysts, and Russian citizens believe is still Russia’s paramount leader despite stepping down as president last year, was speaking after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Moscow for two days of talks.

“There is no need to frighten the Iranians,” Putin told reporters in Beijing after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

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In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning ”“ along with China, Russia, Japan and France ”“ to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

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Update: Jim Lindgren has comments on this there.

The problem, one Western official explained, is that Iran said nothing about how much enriched uranium it would send to Russia, or when. Saeed Jalili, chief negotiator, called Tehran during the talks and got the go-ahead to back a deal ”” in principle. Since then Iran’s officials have been saying: “Hold on, we said nothing firm”.

On October 18 Iran must tell the agency whether it will let inspectors into the Tehran reactor and, on the 24th and 25th, to Qom. Those who argue that there’s progress say that if, at the end of the year, Iran “is just messing us about” then there’ll be an even better case for sanctions.

If you look at the gains on either side in the past fortnight, the West has a promise without numbers. Tehran has a few solid more months to spin its uranium centrifuges.

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Iran has the know-how to produce a nuclear bomb and may already have tested a detonation system small enough to fit into the warhead of a medium-range missile, according to confidential papers.

The “secret annexe” to this year’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran summarises information submitted by intelligence agencies about the country’s work on warheads, detonators and nuclear fuel enrichment. It is based partly on evidence thought to have been smuggled out of Iran by the wife of a spy recruited by German intelligence.

The papers conclude that Iran already “has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device”, or atom bomb.

The finding goes beyond America’s public stance and may complicate its efforts at talks in Geneva to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

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President Obama got what he said he wanted when United States negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts this week in Geneva: direct engagement, without preconditions, with Iran.

But the trick now for Mr. Obama, administration officials concede, will be to avoid getting tripped up. In other words, is the Iranian government serious this time?

The clearest risk is that the Iranians may play for time, as they have often been accused of doing in the past, making promises and encouraging more meetings, while waiting for political currents to change or the closed ranks among the Western allies to break.

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The topic is bound to come up in looming talks that officials from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China will have with representatives of Iran.

Unfortunately, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy pointed out last week at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on nuclear proliferation, years of gradually stronger sanctions against Iran for ignoring that body’s to stop enriching uranium have only led to “more enriched uranium, more centrifuges” for enriching it, and a vow to “wipe a U.N. member [Israel] off the map.”

That history shows that more talk will only lead to more talk while Iran forges ahead.

With or without the help of Russia and China, however, the U.S. and European nations, must meet Iranian defiance head on with severe economic sanctions.

The time for talking should be past.

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The Obama administration’s Arab-Israeli peace process is in more trouble than even the White House realizes. To be sure, the Israelis and Palestinians are both dug in, and when the president sought baby steps from the Arabs toward normalizing relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait rebuffed the administration. But now even Cairo, where Obama hit his reset button with the Muslim world, has made its stand, albeit much less publicly. The campaign against Egyptian editor and analyst Hala Mustafa for meeting with Israel’s ambassador to Cairo is sufficient evidence that the first country to have a peace treaty with Jerusalem is no closer to normalization than it was when Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords 30 years ago.

Recently, Israel’s envoy to Egypt, Shalom Cohen, visited Mustafa at her office in the Al-Ahram newspaper building, home to the semi-official daily to which Mustafa often contributes, and where she edits the quarterly Arabic-language journal, Democracy.

“The ambassador had a proposal to convene a symposium and asked me to participate,” Mustafa told me by phone. “Egyptians, Israelis and Palestinians were to discuss Obama’s initiatives and the peace process. Since we would need authorization from Al-Ahram and other state institutions, I didn’t give him any final decision.”

Nonetheless, chairman of the Egyptian press syndicate Makram Muhammad Ahmed claimed that Mustafa’s brief interview with Cohen violated the boycott of the Zionist enemy that the syndicate adopted in 1983.

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Locked in a deepening dispute with the United States and its allies over its nuclear program, Iran was reported Monday to have test-fired long-range missiles capable of striking Israel and American bases in the Persian Gulf in what seemed a show of force.

The reported tests of the Shahab-3 and Sejil missiles by the Revolutionary Guards were not the first conducted by Iran, but they came at a time of high tension, days after President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain used the disclosure of a previously secret nuclear plant in Iran to threaten Tehran with a stronger response, including harsher economic sanctions.

Iran says it wants to develop a nuclear capacity for peaceful purposes but many in the west say it is seeking to create a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran says its missile tests have been planned for some time and are not linked to the nuclear dispute.

The test-firing also came days before the first direct contact in decades between the United States and Iran at international talks in Geneva, set for Thursday.

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Iran began test-firing missiles yesterday, starting days of war games before a confrontation with foreign powers over a previously undisclosed secret nuclear facility.

The revelations about the enrichment plant, at a military base near the holy city of Qom, has dramatically upped the stakes for the meeting in Geneva on Thursday between Iranian representatives and those of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

The US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany had demanded that Iran offer a “serious response” to questions about a military dimension to its nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is purely peaceful.

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