Geopolitics Weekly

A Facebook spokesman says the “likes” from dead people can happen if an account doesn’t get “memorialized” (meaning someone informs Facebook that the account-holder has died). If nobody tells Facebook that the account-holder is dead, Facebook just keeps operating on the assumption the person is alive.

In that case, someone’s “likes” from months and months ago can still keep surfacing in the news feeds of their friends, since Facebook recycles “likes” long after they first occur. Who knew?

Thing is, according to my pal Brendan O’Malley, there’s no way that his late friend Alex, who “hated corporate bullshit,” would have “liked” Discover. And what about all these other “likes” from living people, the ones where someone is credited with “liking” something and they swear they didn’t do it?

blunt criticism from the US of Israel's announcement on Monday of plans to build an extra 1,500 homes in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo.US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: "We are deeply disappointed that Israel insists on continuing this pattern of provocative action. These repeated announcements and plans of new construction run counter to the cause of peace. Israel's leaders continually say that they support a path towards a two-state solution, yet these actions only put that goal further at risk."

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, urged Israel to revoke the decision, saying that if it was implemented, "it would make a negotiated two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, very difficult to achieve". All Israeli settlements were "illegal under international law", he added.

French officials also sharply condemned the move, describing it as illegal colonisation.

David Cameron risks making "premature" and "opportunistic" demands in Europe and weakening Britain's power in Washington and other major capitals, the most senior diplomat to leave government in recent years has warned.Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain's ambassador to Washington until last year and before that the senior British diplomat in Brussels, said in a Guardian interview that recent warnings by the US administration urging Britain against staging a distracting referendum was "a conscious decision by the Obama administration to intervene in the UK debate", reflecting a long-standing view that it wanted its closest political ally closely involved in Europe.

Sheinwald said: "If Britain is active and influential in Washington that makes us more influential in Brussels, Delhi and elsewhere. Equally if we are influential in Europe, then we have a bigger impact in Washington and the other power capitals of the world. These things are mutually reinforcing.

"I just cannot see any logical basis for thinking a move to the sidelines, or particularly a move out of Europe, would be anything other than diminishing to UK's capacity, standing, influence, ability to get things done and capacity to build coalitions internationally."

Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.

Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.

The Goldberg article, along with Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel as defence secretary, has been interpreted in Israel as clear signs of the president's exasperation with Netanyahu and possible payback for the latter's support of Obama's rival, Mitt Romney, in the US election in November. Hagel is seen as "anti-Israel" because of his questioning of Israeli government policy and the pro-Israel lobby in the US.

"Obama... has been consistent in his analysis of Israel's underlying challenge: If it doesn't disentangle itself from the lives of West Bank Palestinians, the world will one day decide it is behaving as an apartheid state." The White House did not deny the words attributed to the president.

The forthcoming elections are significantly different from all the previous ones. The projected victory of the right, according to the polls, is not the result of the satisfaction of the voters with Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, but primarily a result of the perceived reality of Israel and the Middle East. The cumulative effect of both internal and regional changes has led most Israelis to be sceptical about the possibility of achieving peace in the region.

The more the Israeli left persisted in embracing the slogans of Peace Now in the face of these acts of terror, the more the public distanced itself from the left. As a result, the right once again came to power, led by Ariel Sharon. During this period, the reign of terror was successfully suppressed by the military.

Then came a major strategic turning point in the Israeli political map. In 2005 Sharon, one of the original proponents and builders of the settlements, carried out Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, fulfilling one of the left's long-held dreams.The disengagement from Gaza, which involved moving Jews from their homes, caused national trauma. But it was nonetheless carried out successfully, complying with a legitimate decision taken by a democratic state.The vast majority of the Israeli public accepted Sharon's justification for disengaging from Gaza. The public also accepted his argument that following the disengagement it would be possible to cut relations with the Strip, and thereby benefit from relative calm. Israelis were attracted to the idea that "they are there and we are here".The reality was different. Hamas came to power and Gaza became a permanent terrorist threat. Most Israelis were forced to conclude that there is a serious flaw with the idea of "land for peace".

"There will be an over-representation of the religious and ultra-orthodox – around one in three members of the Knesset, according to the latest polls," said Ofer Kenig, of the Israel Democracy Institute. About one in five members of the last Knesset were religious or ultra-orthodox, he said."This is a very significant change. The explanation is not necessarily the demographic growth of this sector but the success of religious parties in attracting support from secular and traditional voters."

He said there would be "a very high representation of Jewish settlers", up to 20 of the 120 members of the Knesset. Less than 5% of Israel's population lives in West Bank settlements.

the new political elite was a coalition of West Bank settlers, ultra-orthodox, national-religious and rightwing city dwellers.

Yesh Atid, a new centrist party led by the former television personality Yair Lapid, won 19 seats. It concentrated its election campaign on socio-economic issues and removing the exemption for military service for ultra-orthodox Jews.

Yehuda Ben Meir of the Institute of National Security Studies, said: "The story of this election is a slight move to the centre, and above all the possibility of Netanyahu forming a coalition only with his 'natural partners' does not exist. He is definitely going to work for a wider coalition."

Kadima, which was the biggest party in the last parliament with 28 seats, saw its support plummet and only just crossed the threshold of votes needed to win two seats, according to the partial results.

The Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has swatted aside warnings that his government faces a middle class revolt if it does not embrace deeper economic and political reforms.

A session on Russia at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday heard that the Russian Federation faces several negative scenarios, including the potential threat of civil unrest. A straw poll of WEF associates in the audience found nearly 80% saw better governance as Russia's biggest challenge.

Alexey Kudrin, a professor at Saint Petersburg State University, said there were "serious, negative" warnings coming from Russia's business community. He outlined a scenario in which falling oil prices send Russia's budget forecasts off track, forcing the government to hike taxes and slash spending on social programmes, and freezing reform efforts.

Poland is the only EU country not to have fallen into recession since the Lehman Brothers crash. Increasingly it sees its future in being as closely integrated in the EU as possible, playing the regional leader and usurping Britain's position in policy-making influence.

For that to succeed, euro membership is essential as the zone binds itself into closer political and economic regimes and becomes the key decision-taking forum. The Polish president recently established a high-powered committee to examine and foster eurozone membership. Warsaw is now talking of a 2017 deadline.

whatever happens to the euro happens to us anyway. Our economy is completely euro-ised: 80% of borrowing, households and businesses, is in euros. This will help financial and economic stability."Similar arguments are made in Lithuania, while in Poland the impetus is less economic than political and geo-political. Warsaw appears resolved to hitch itself to Germany, and deems it a national security imperative, worried about Vladimir Putin's Russia, to embed itself utterly in the EU. It increasingly sees the eurozone as the safest of havens, despite the volatility.

Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".

"The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. "Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."

The most dramatic fall in faith in the EU has occurred in Spain, where the banking and housing market collapse, eurozone bailout and runaway unemployment have combined to produce 72% "tending not to trust" the EU, with only 20% "tending to trust".

In Spain, trust in the EU fell from 65% to 20% over the five-year period while mistrust soared to 72% from 23%.

In every one of the big European states, trust has gone into "a vertiginous decline". Five years ago, no country, not even Britain, showed more than half its voters hostile to Europe, and most were strongly supportive. Now, according to the EU's own Eurobarometer, distrust runs at 53% in Italy, 56% in France, 59% in Germany, 69% in the UK and 72% in Spain. The EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens. Does it matter?

"Anti-Europeanism" was growing across Europe even before the credit crunch – witness the Lisbon treaty referendums. It is reflected in the rise of nationalist parties and is rampant even among such one-time EU loyalists as Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany. As the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations, José Ignacio Torreblanca, said of yesterday's poll, "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor or debtor country … citizens now think their national democracy is being subverted."

Dreams make dangerous politics, and when they require the imposition of "yet more Europe" against the run of public opinion, they are badly in need of a reality check. The new requirement that the EU (in this case Germany) imposes budgets on indebted states goes far beyond anything domestic voters seem likely to tolerate.Barroso's dream is becoming the vision espoused by the Columbia professor of European history István Deák, who demanded last year in the New York Times "a new imperial construct" as the only alternative to save the continent from a "revival of tribalism". To Deák this new empire was "a sacred task … an almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church".

Ukip has delivered its strongest performance in local elections

In the biggest surge by a fourth party in England since the second world war, Ukip averaged 26% of the vote in council wards where it stood, according to a BBC estimate

Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary, played down the Ukip threat. He told the BBC: "It is a protest party and not a party of government. Its economic policy does not add up."

Ukip's surge to 23% of the vote – just 2% behind the Tories – reinforced their fear that Farage and his team could emerge as the largest party from next year's European elections.

Tories are increasingly concerned that, if they fail to act, Farage could go on to inflict serious damage on their prospects of keeping Labour out of power at the 2015 general election.

In the first referendum, people would be asked to give Cameron authority to renegotiate the terms of UK membership on issues such as employment policy, co-operation over police and justice policy, and immigration. A second in/out referendum would be held, as is planned in the next parliament, in which people would be asked if they wanted to remain in the EU after a deal was reached with the UK's EU partners.