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Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has praised a UN proposal to regulate Iran's uranium enrichment programme.

Under the plan, low-enriched fuel would be further processed outside Iran.

On Thursday, the UN's nuclear watchdog confirmed it had received Iran's response to the directive, but its contents have not been released.

a leaked cable

Gen McChrystal was "fuming" about Mr Eikenberry's intervention

appeared to endorse an Israeli position that talks could start before a settlement freeze which the Palestinians are demanding.

Washington has changed tack, saying the most important thing was to get the negotiations going again.

The Palestinian refusal to acquiesce in this means the chances appear slimmer than ever that these talks about talks can be turned into substantive negotiations, BBC Jerusalem correspondent Paul Wood said.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has said he is not willing to hold face-to-face talks with the Israeli leader

Al-Assad said: "If Mr [Binyamin] Netanyahu is serious, he can send a team of experts, and we'll send a team of experts to Turkey. Then we can really talk, if they're interested."

Mr Walt argued that Bush-era foreign policy represented a disastrous departure from an American tradition of similar restraint, and that Barack Obama showed promising signs of a return to those roots.

The challenge with Iran is to preserve the clear impression, both on the part of China and on the part of the world at large, that it is not America that is upsetting the balance by asking for sanctions; it is Iran that is upsetting the balance by pursuing nuclear weapons, with consequences that America cannot forestall alone.

Their gratuitously provocative, adolescent threat Sunday to build ten new nuclear processing plants—a threat everyone agrees they lack the capacity to follow through on—makes them appear simultaneously scary, unreliable and weak.

Two natural-gas fields in Israel's Mediterranean waters were found in January to contain enough resources to meet Israel's energy needs for 20 years

Since January, Israeli oil companies' stocks have soared, some rising as much as tenfold.

Mr. Langotsky remains defiantly upbeat. The son of early Zionist pioneers who valued duty to country over self, he insists his passionate search for oil was never about the money. "I'm very proud; I feel great," he says. "I am totally disappointed that I failed to keep my rights, but this discovery is one of the greatest achievements of my life."

Clinton told an audience Oct. 7 in Mount Vernon, Iowa, that a final peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians is unlikely until both sides “know what happens in Syria" and also depends on whether Jordan remains stable.

Questioning Jordan’s long-term stability angered many in the country’s political elite

“If such statements come from an individual who has no background to the Middle East and has a lack of intelligence about the situation in Jordan, nobody would react to it. But because it comes from Mrs. Clinton, this really has generated very serious and poor reactions in Jordan.”

the White House is embarking on an economic offensive intended to collapse the Iranian government, which is already contending with a steady tempo of internal unrest driven by economic and political frustrations

Those who have lamented Obama’s restraint in the Middle East will now have another taste of its antithesis: the purposeful American disruption of the status quo underpinned by the assumption that things can only get better. Unfortunately, that rarely holds true in the Middle East

It’s not just oil: U.S. sanctions will be felt across every aspect of the Iranian economy, although in theory, agricultural products, medicines, and medical devices are exempted. In practice, the repercussions are sweeping and unpredictable

Military and intelligence officials are understandably wary of labeling part of another state’s military establishment as terrorists: Officials at the Pentagon and the C.I.A. — which Mr. Pompeo ran in the Trump administration’s first year — oppose designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards or the Iraqi militias as terrorist groups, fearing a backlash that could constrain American troops.

Iraqi opposition to a continued U.S. military presence in the country was on the rise even before Trump put his foot in his mouth about “watching Iran” from Iraq, and that opposition seems certain to increase if these proposed designations of Iraqi militias and officials go ahead.

The proposed terrorist designations are a good example of why the Trump administration is having such difficulty building international support for its “maximum pressure” campaign. They make a habit of insisting that other governments cooperate against Iran. Then, instead of giving them incentives to cooperate, they threaten them with penalties and drive the other governments to find workarounds to increase their cooperation with Iran instead. The U.S. is used to having its allies and clients fall in line when our government tells them what they are supposed to do, but that isn’t happening here.

A federal court has held Syria’s government liable for the targeting and killing of an American journalist as she reported on the shelling of a rebellious area of Homs in 2012. The decision could help ease the way for war-crimes prosecutions arising from the Syria conflict.

awarded $302.5 million to relatives of the journalist, Marie Colvin. Of that sum, $300 million is punitive damages for what Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her ruling, called “Syria’s longstanding policy of violence” that aimed “to intimidate journalists” and “suppress dissent.”

The large size of the award sends a message, he said, that “the rule of law is still a force to be reckoned with,” even amid a global trend toward authoritarianism and the killing of journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian slain in his country’s consulate in Istanbul.

It will seem counterintuitive to many that someone would trade “senior official” status for a job in a “think tank” to exert more influence. But I had concluded in the late summer of 2012 that President Barack Obama’s words of a year earlier about Assad stepping aside were empty, and that my efforts in government to bring dead words to life were futile.  Instead of implementing what had sounded like the commander-in-chief’s directive, the State Department was saddled in August 2012 by the White House with a make-work, labor-intensive project cataloguing the countless things that would have to be in place for a post-Assad Syria to function. But how to get to post-Assad? The White House had shut down the sole interagency group examining options for achieving that end.

My job since April 2009, as a deputy to Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell, was to build a foundation for Syrian-Israeli and eventually Israeli-Lebanese peace. Progress on the former seemed to be happening. Yet by using deadly force on his own citizens, Assad ended, perhaps forever, a process that might have recovered for Syria the territory lost by his Minister of Defense father in 1967.  When the full story of Syria’s betrayal by a family and its entourage is written, the decision of Assad to sink a potentially promising peace mediation will merit a chapter.

President Obama would caricature external alternatives by creating and debating straw men: invented idiots calling for the invasion and occupation of Syria.  He would deal with internal dissent by taking officials through multi-step, worst-case, hypothetical scenarios of what might happen in the wake of any American attempt, no matter how modest, to complicate regime mass murder. The ‘logical’ result would inevitably involve something between World War III and an open-ended, treasury-draining American commitment.  The result of these exercises in self-disarmament would be Vladimir Putin and his ilk concluding that American power was, as a practical matter, equal to Palau’s; Ukraine could be dismembered, NATO allies threatened, and the United States itself harassed with impunity. He did not mean to do it, but Barack Obama’s performance in Syria produced global destabilization.

Thousands of Yemenis have taken to the streets of the capital, Sanaa, to protest after an air strike killed more than 140 people at a wake on Saturday.Demonstrators gathered outside the UN headquarters demanding an international investigation into the strike, blamed on the Saudi-led coalition.

Powerful former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied himself with the Houthi rebels that control Sanaa, has called for people to attack soldiers on the Saudi border in revenge.

attack has been condemned by the UN, European Union and the US

As ties with the Obama White House deteriorated, ruling circles in Gulf capitals became increasingly muscular in pursuing their own regional interests. This was, in part, a reaction by Saudi and Emirati officials to Qatar’s assertive approach to the uprisings in North Africa and Syria between 2011 and 2013

The second phase of the Gulf states’ regional assertiveness (after Qatar’s activist approach in 2011 and 2012) played out in Libya, Yemen, the Gulf and Egypt. Saudi Arabia and the UAE funneled tens of billions of dollars in financial aid and investment in infrastructure designed to kickstart the ailing Egyptian economy. The UAE coordinated closely with Egypt and Russia to triangulate support for the Libyan strongman, Khalifa Haftar, as he battled Islamist militias in eastern Libya, carving out a largely autonomous sphere of influence separate from the internationally backed political process in Tripoli. The Saudis and Emiratis, together with the Bahrainis, withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar in March 2014 and accused Doha of interfering in the domestic affairs of its regional neighbors.

On the international stage, King Salman of Saudi Arabia made clear his displeasure with the Obama administration by canceling his planned attendance of the US-GCC summit at Camp David in May 2015. Six weeks earlier, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had launched Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen. The Yemen war was designed to restore the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi, ousted in 2014 by the tactical alliance of Iran-allied Houthi rebels and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s armed loyalists. Launched just five days before the initial deadline (later extended to July 2015) in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, the decision to take military action to counter and roll back perceived Iranian influence in Yemen represented a Saudi-led rebuke to the Obama administration’s belief that it was possible to separate the nuclear issue from Iran’s meddling in regional affairs.

James K. Glassman, the under secretary for public diplomacy during the George W. Bush administration, said the center’s uncertain funding and temporary leadership reflected the administration’s lack of interest in countering either jihadist or Russian propaganda.“They’ve got the vehicle to do this work in the center,” Mr. Glassman said. “What they don’t have is a secretary of state or a president who’s interested in doing this work.”

In the latest expansion of America’s secret wars, about a dozen Army commandos have been on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen since late last year, according to an exclusive report by The Times. The commandos are helping to locate and destroy missiles and launch sites used by indigenous Houthi rebels in Yemen to attack Saudi cities.This involvement puts the lie to Pentagon statements that American military aid to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics and intelligence, and is not related to combat.When senators at a hearing in March demanded to know whether American troops were at risk of entering hostilities with the Houthis, Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Central Command, assured them, “We’re not parties to this conflict.”

In at least 14 countries, American troops are fighting extremist groups that are professed enemies of the United States or are connected, sometimes quite tenuously, to such militants. The Houthis pose no such threat to the United States. But they are backed by Iran, so the commandos’ deployment increases the risk that the United States could come into direct conflict with that country, a target of increasing ire from the administration, the Saudis and Israelis.

Congress never specifically approved military involvement in the Saudi-Houthi civil war

it’s time to take stock of how broadly American forces are already committed to far-flung regions and to begin thinking hard about how much of that investment is necessary, how long it should continue and whether there is a strategy beyond just killing terrorists. Which Congress, lamentably, has not done. If the public is quiet, that is partly because so few families bear so much of this military burden, and partly because America is not involved in anything comparable to the Vietnam War, when huge American casualties produced sustained public protest. It is also because Congress has spent little time considering such issues in a comprehensive way or debating why all these deployments are needed

President Trump, like his predecessor, insists that legislation passed in 2001 to authorize the war against Al Qaeda is sufficient. It isn’t. After the Niger tragedy, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee, has agreed to at least hold a hearing on the authorization issue.

“a collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America.”

Palestine was not lost in the late 1940s, as is commonly believed; it was lost in the late 1930s, as a result of Britain’s savage smashing of Palestinian resistance and support for Jewish paramilitary forces

Churchill held Arabs in contempt as racially inferior. His description of Palestinian Arabs as a “dog in a manger” is shocking, but not entirely surprising; racism usually goes hand in hand with colonialism.

In British eyes, a Palestinian state was synonymous with a mufti state; accordingly, Britain’s hostility towards Palestinians and Palestinian statehood was a constant factor in its foreign policy from 1947-49.

a message killing

With the fate of the economy in the hands of vaccine manufacturers and the future of his trial in the hands of independent prosecutors and, so far, unsympathetic judges, Mr Netanyahu has dialled up the volume on the one arena in which he has unquestioned sway — foreign policy.

Here, archaeology is war

the opening of the Western Wall tunnel sent a staggering blow to Israeli-Palestinian relations, serving as a historical reminder that archaeology can easily provide a spark for wars to come

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to close the tunnel at Palestinian insistence would be to be cede some of Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem, which he views as the country's eternal, indivisible capital. Likewise, for Palestinians the tunnel is an example of Israel tightening its grip over East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as a capital of a future state.