The Israeli cabinet has decided to include some West Bank settlements in a national scheme that will entitle them to millions of dollars' worth of funds.

"We accepted the proposal in principle," Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki told reporters at a regional security conference in Bahrain. In what is almost certain to be a deal breaker, however, he spoke of exchanging the material in phases rather than all at once as is called for in the U.N. plan. He said Iran had offered to make a first shipment of 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of enriched uranium. Carrying it out in slow stages would leave Iran in control of enough uranium to make a bomb.

Israelis know better than anyone else that the trick to developing a nuclear weapon as a small power is to drag out the process of diplomacy and inspections long enough to produce sufficient quantities of fissionable material. Israel should know: in the 1960s, it deliberately misled U.S. inspectors and repeatedly delayed site visits, providing the time to construct its Dimona reactor and reprocess enough plutonium to build a bomb. North Korea has followed a similar path, with similar results. And now, Israel suspects, Iran is doing the same, only with highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium.

Although many analysts question the rationality of the Iranian regime, it is in fact fairly conservative in its foreign policy. Iran has two long-range goals, achieving regional hegemony and spreading fundamentalist Islam, neither of which will be achieved if Iran initiates a nuclear exchange with Israel.

Israel fears that Iran’s nuclear ambitions could undermine its qualitative superiority of arms and its consistent ability to inflict disproportionate casualties on adversaries -- the cornerstones of Israel’s defense strategy.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There are two ways to interpret the vote.

Imams can then preach a message of self-segregation and a bold rejection of the ways of the non-Muslims.

the locals are 100 percent sure that foreign forces will leave the area sooner or later but the Taliban will be back

by increasing the ANA capabilities, the United States and its allies will be able to finish the job, but not so hastily.

Seasoned observers find preposterous the prospect that a crash training program could double the size of both the police and the army and turn them into effective, upright and independent security forces in the space of two years or so. (Obama wants to begin drawing back down U.S. forces in only 18 months.) Nor would mere basic training address the problems of illiteracy, drug use, corruption, desertion and ethnic grievances.

Obama is in danger of being misled by the inside-the-Beltway think tank consensus on what happened in Iraq, and of applying those "lessons" to Afghanistan. Even if the two actually resembled one another, the Washington story about Iraq is full of holes. But they are very different countries, societies and situations. Bush caught a break with his surge, inasmuch as it coincided with a massive shift in the local power balance. Obama will have to be very lucky indeed to catch a similar break in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda is not really active in Afghanistan anymore, and it is not equivalent with the Taliban (either the Afghan or Pakistani variants).  Al-Qaeda Central still matters, but the decentralized network and ideological narrative around the world no longer depends on it.   Nothing the U.S. does or does not do in Afghanistan will defeat al-Qaeda -- the failure of that movement will happen for its own reasons, if it happens (as it already largely has in the Arab world). The moment where Obama recognized this reality was both reassuring and terrifying:  when he mentioned Somalia and Yemen.  He understands that Afghanistan is not the only, or even the primary, location where those motivated by al-Qaeda's ideas can operate.  But  if the next move is to bring  governance and stability, and counter-terrorism and COIN, to every ungoverned space on Earth -- or even every Muslim-majority ungoverned space on Earth -- then we are truly facing bankruptcy.  Intellectually, financially, militarily, and politically.   We can't afford to do this in Afghanistan. We certainly can't afford to do it in Somalia and Yemen... even if we should, which I strongly doubt.

I haven't heard anybody yet say that they believed that Obama would really start drawing down in June 2011, no matter what he says.  And yet the strategy depends upon that commitment being credible, because that is what is supposed to generate the urgency for local actors to change.

the best way for skeptics such as myself to help this strategy to succeed is to keep a sharp focus on the proposed mechanisms of change, demanding evidence that they are actually happening, and to hold the administration to its pledges to maintaining a clear time horizon and to avoiding the iron logic of serial escalations of a failing enterprise.

diplomats close to the EU deliberations believe it is almost inevitable.

"an independent, democratic, contiguous and viable state of Palestine, comprising the West Bank and Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital."

the EU Council "has never recognized the annexation of East Jerusalem. If there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found to resolve the status of Jerusalem as capital of two states. The Council calls for the reopening of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem in accordance with the road map. It also calls on the Israeli government to cease all discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem."

Bigotry must be condemned wherever it occurs. If majority-Muslim countries want to criticize the mistreatment of Muslims living as minority communities elsewhere, they should be prepared to withstand the same level of scrutiny regarding their own mistreatment of minorities. Millions of non-Muslim migrant workers have helped build Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups have long condemned the slave-like conditions that many toil under, and the possibility of Saudi citizenship is nonexistent. Muslim nations have been unwilling to criticize this bigotry in their midst, and Europeans should keep in mind that Sunday's ban takes them in this direction.

He said, in his opinion, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was legal – a view rejected by critics who say it violated international law – but was of "questionable legitimacy." "It did not have the democratically observable backing of the great majority of member states, or even perhaps of the majority of people inside the U.K.," he said. In London, an anti-war rally in 2003 drew an estimated 2 million demonstrators – the largest street protest in a generation.