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Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman held talks on Wednesday with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a US official said

Suleiman, who has not spoken to the media, met Tuesday with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell as well as with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, officials said.

An Egyptian official who declined to be named said Suleiman was in Washington to seek a softer stance on the Islamist movement Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, so that it can participate in an internationally-recognized Palestinian unity government.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The head US negotiator for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), Rose Gottemoeller, has called upon Israel to become an NNPT member-state. Was this a smart move? Herf: I don't know what the purpose of such a proposal is. Is it to enhance the legitimacy of Israel's nuclear weapons? Or is it to place them on the negotiating table so that pressure can be brought to bear to bring about Israel's unilateral nuclear disarmament? If that is the purpose, it amounts to appeasement of Iran and reminds me of the Soviet Union's diplomatic efforts to disarm France and Great Britain in the course of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations in Geneva in the early 1980s. The British and French refused all such efforts and the Israelis will do so as well for exactly the same reason: such weapons are a deterrent of last resort. Moreover, it is Iran, not Israel, that is violating numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions. It is Iran whose nuclear ambitions threaten to make the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter.

If the Obama administration is engaged in a diplomatic effort of very short duration to give Iran a chance to turn away from its nuclear ambitions, then perhaps there is some merit in doing so

If however, the Obama administration thinks that smiles and a new tone will change Iranian behavior, it is pursuing a policy that is both naive and potentially dangerous.

American officials say they believe that Mr. Kim, in rapidly declining health, is maneuvering to make his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, his successor, perhaps after a period in which his brother-in-law, Jang Seong-taek, would serve as a regent.

The nuclear test and the test-firing of six short-range missiles, the American officials said, must be understood within the context of this internal struggle to extend the Kim dynasty’s rule for another generation.

“The North Korean leadership cares about internal matters, not external matters,” said Wendy R. Sherman, who coordinated North Korea policy in the Clinton administration. “They care about external matters only insofar as it helps ensure the survival of the regime.”Under those circumstances, she said, North Korea is not likely to be receptive to incentives. And it may have concluded that having nuclear weapons is a necessity for its own preservation.

North Korea failed in its highly vaunted effort to fire a satellite into orbit, military and private experts said Sunday after reviewing detailed tracking data that showed the missile and payload fell into the sea. Some said the failure undercut the North Korean campaign to come across as a fearsome adversary able to hurl deadly warheads halfway around the globe.

looking at the launching from a purely technical vantage point, space experts said the failure represented a blow that in all likelihood would seriously delay the missile’s debut.

Analysts dismissed the idea that the rocket firing could represent a furtive success, calling the failure consistent with past North Korean fumbles and suggesting it might reveal a significant quality control problem in one of the world’s most isolated nations.

The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval.

ultimately I concluded, in The War of the World, that three factors made the location and timing of lethal organized violence more or less predictable in the last century. The first factor was ethnic disintegration: Violence was worst in areas of mounting ethnic tension. The second factor was economic volatility: The greater the magnitude of economic shocks, the more likely conflict was. And the third factor was empires in decline: When structures of imperial rule crumbled, battles for political power were most bloody.

When Bush’s speechwriters coined the phrase “axis of evil” (originally “axis of hatred”), they were drawing a parallel with the World War II alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan, formalized in the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. The axis of upheaval, by contrast, is more reminiscent of the decade before the outbreak of World War II, when the Great Depression unleashed a wave of global political crises.