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But presumably to appease his right-wing constituents he allowed building to continue in East Jerusalem and on 3,000 housing units elsewhere in the West Bank.

Though limited in scope, the freeze has aggravated an ideological fault line between settlers and Netanyahu.

While his rejection earlier this year of President Obama's call for a comprehensive settlement freeze sparked the most public Israel-US spat in two decades, Netanyahu's slowdown has been praised by the administration. George Mitchell, Obama's special envoy for Middle East Peace, said last week that Netanyahu's move "falls short of a full settlement freeze, but it is more than any Israeli government has done before and can help movement toward agreement between the parties."

The Obama administration has an opportunity to break the current logjam in the Middle East by focusing away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and pushing for renewed Syrian-Israeli negotiations. The Syrian-Israeli track can move faster than Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, where the two sides are still far apart on the central issues: Israeli settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the final status of Jerusalem. By contrast, the Syrians and Israelis mainly need to negotiate over the return of the Golan Heights, and related security guarantees and water access issues.

Unlike the weak Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Syrian President Bashar Assad can actually deliver on a peace deal. Such an agreement is possible during Obama's presidency, but it will not happen without the deep involvement of his administration. The United States has much to gain strategically from renewed Syrian-Israeli dialogue: Damascus could be pressed to play a more constructive role in the region, instead of being a spoiler. If there are serious negotiations, the United States can demand that Assad's regime stop interfering in Iraq, carry out domestic reforms, respect human rights and drop Syrian support for Hamas and other Palestinian groups that reject peace with Israel. To achieve peace, the United States must strongly push Israel back to negotiations and be willing to dispatch U.S. personnel as monitors of any final agreement.

The only answer to the question of whether IP serves the desired purpose must be empirical. Does it work in practice? A great deal of applied economic research has tried to answer this question. The short answer is that intellectual property does not increase innovation and creation. Extending IP rights may modestly boost the incentive for innovation, but this positive effect is wiped away by the negative effect of creating monopolies. There is simply no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation or economic productivity. In fact, some evidence shows that increased protection even decreases innovation.

Ideas kept under lock and key are much less useful than those that are freely available. So we find Africans dying of AIDS because they cannot afford to pay monopoly prices to patent holders of certain drugs. Or, at a more mundane level, we cannot legally watch movies on our new Android phones because "rights holders" do not wish us to. And we must suffer through such indignities as being sued by voting machine companies over copyright violation when their malfunctioning software is revealed to the public.

Rather than trying to continually fix the existing system with band-aids, it would be far better to eliminate it entirely. The resulting drastic restructuring of industry would lead to new, more competitive business models – and an environment far more favorable to the small entrepreneur.

The result is a fundamental shift to the right – and toward an unprecedented degree of militarization – in Iran's government. While the Guard has long been the keeper of Iran's most important secrets, including its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile arsenal, it has now in many ways also become the kingmaker in Iranian politics.

The result is a fundamental shift to the right – and toward an unprecedented degree of militarization – in Iran's government. While the Guard has long been the keeper of Iran's most important secrets, including its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile arsenal, it has now in many ways also become the kingmaker in Iranian politics. Mr. Khamenei is "still the supreme authority in Iran, but in a lot of ways he has become beholden to the Revolutionary Guard to maintain his authority, because his position [as supreme leader] has lost so much credibility,

In recent weeks the Guard or affiliated companies have made new acquisitions that will deepen their influence over what people read and watch, and how they communicate in private. They announced the creation of a new media outlet called Atlas, to be rolled out next spring; bought a 50 percent, $7.8 billion stake in Iran's newly privatized telecommunications company; and added a $2.5 billion rail contract to the large portion of Iran's economy – from infrastructure to laser eye surgery – that the IRGC already controls.

Though the official results are not yet known, exit polls show that Morales won roughly 63% of the vote, with his closest rival, former conservative governor Manfred Reyes Villa, winning around 23% of the vote. The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Morales’ political party, also won over two thirds of the seats in the lower house and the senate, meaning the MAS administration will have an easier time passing laws without right wing opposition.

During his first four years in office Morales partially nationalized Bolivia’s vast gas reserves, ushered in a new constitution written in a constituent assembly, granted more rights to indigenous people and exerted more state-control over natural resources and the economy. Much of the wealth generated from new state-run industries has been directed to various social and development programs to benefit impoverished sectors of society.

Thanks to such far-reaching government programs and socialistic policies, Bolivia’s economic growth has been higher during the four years under Morales than at any other period during the last three decades, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear three cases in its current term examining a controversial federal statute that makes it a crime "to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." The law is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of prosecutors seeking to root out all forms of public and private corruption. But the statute, critics say, fails to give fair warning of precisely which conduct violates the law.

In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down a similar "honest services" law, saying the outer boundaries of the statute were too ambiguous. The court said that federal prosecutors seeking to prove mail fraud would have to show a deprivation of actual physical property. In other words, it wasn't enough to provide evidence that a defendant had infringed "the intangible right of the citizenry to good government." The court declared: "If Congress desires to go further, it must speak more clearly than it has."

The bill must now go to a conference committee to resolve significant differences between the House and Senate versions. And history shows that agreement is far from guaranteed. In fact, just last year, a bill reforming the Indian Health Service died when the conference committee couldn't overcome its differences on abortion. Similarly, in 2007, bills dealing with issues as varied as campaign-finance reform, corporate pensions and closing tax loopholes passed both chambers but never became law. .author_pub2 a { float:right; margin: 10px 0 8px 8px; display:block; height: 142px; width: 110px; background: url(/people/pub_photos/tanner.jpg) no-repeat -110px 0; } .author_pub2a a { float:right; margin: 10px 0 8px 8px; display:block; height: 142px; width: 110px; background: url(/people/pub_photos/tanner.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; }

It's important to remember that the House bill passed with just three votes to spare and the Senate bill received exactly the 60 votes needed for passage. Democratic leaders have little room to maneuver as they try to resolve such issues as:

The Public Option: The Senate rejected the concept of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) made it clear that inclusion of the so-called public option would cause them to join a Republican filibuster. They are justifiably concerned that a taxpayer-subsidized government plan would drive private insurance out of the market and lead to a single-payer government-run system. But the House did include a public option -- and retaining it has become the top priority for the Dems' liberal wing. Public-option advocates seemed willing to go along with a proposed Medicare "buy-in" for those 55 to 64, but even that compromise was dropped from the final Senate bill. Now Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn), among others, has made it clear his vote is in doubt if the final bill does not include some form of public option. And such liberal activist groups as Moveon.org have promised to spend the holiday vacation pressuring their allies to fight for the public option.

State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.

It's much more likely that we're facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.

After crunching the numbers, my team has estimated that it would take GDP growth of at least twice the historical average to return state tax revenues to their previous long-term trend line by 2012.

Voting patterns in Afghanistan show strong overlap with ethnic identity. (See map.) Afghanistan was torn apart in the 1990s during a civil war among ethnic-based warlords, and the outcome of the controversial election in August threatens to rekindle ethnic tensions and burnish the power of the old warlords. The present conflict already has ethnic undertones: The Taliban are almost entirely Pashtun, the dominant Afghan group. Now the fraud-ridden presidential vote has alienated the Tajiks, who largely backed the losing candidate, Abdullah Abdullah. In Tajik parts of the country, leaders openly question the legitimacy of the resulting government of President Hamid Karzai (a full-blooded Pashtun).

But strong bulwarks remain against any return to outright ethnic strife. First, Afghans themselves have been conditioned through bloody history to deny the legitimacy of ethnic divisions. Political leaders avoid overt appeals to ethnicity, and ordinary Afghans will often deny that clannish behavior is linked to ethnicity.Second, Dr. Abdullah has fastidiously avoided calling for “peaceful demonstrations,” an oxymoron in Afghan culture. Abdullah’s fondness of his emerging image as a statesman may keep him as a force for peace even if Karzai does little to share the spoils of victory (something unknown at press time).Third, perhaps the only ethnic red line that exists in Afghanistan lies with Pashtuns who feel it is their historical and demographic right to lead the nation. The final election result returned Karzai, a full-blooded Pashtun, to power. In some ways, concerns of a coming ethnic clash would have been more serious if Abdullah had won, given that he is viewed as Tajik, despite having one Pashtun parent.

First, the Journal claims: "The deteriorating U.S. nuclear arsenal is emerging as a big security problem." Not true. U.S. weapons are safe, secure, and effective. No science-based study has found otherwise. The most recent report from JASON -- a premier U.S. defense advisory panel of scientists -- found no evidence that aging posed any threat to the usability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The JASON report said, "Lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence." In an earlier study, JASON scientists found that the plutonium cores of these weapons are reliable for at least 100 years. In other words: The nukes are alright.

Policy experts, however, expect the new budget to be released in February to fully fund the nuclear weapons complex and support both the United States' science-and-engineering base and its nuclear stockpile.

The current policy is to do exactly this, but the Journal's editors are pushing a far-right strategy to build and test new nuclear weapons. This would break U.S. commitments, bring down the global nonproliferation regime, and increase the threats to America.