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A member of the Philippines’ Congress has called for a meeting between the Minister of Labour and his country’s labour secretary to find ways of better protecting Filipinos working in the Emirates.

He called for an agreement between Manila and the Government that would see the UAE more urgently combat the problem of employers withholding the passports of workers from his country.

“We will ask our public relations officers to assist our workers in filing a complaint against their sponsors who are holding their passports,” he said.

Israeli newspapers have run stories warning about the potentially negative prospects for Israel of a British government that accords a prominent position to the Lib Dems. They regard Nick Clegg and his party as positively pro-Palestinian.

For decades Israel and Britain could assume a relatively privileged hearing in Washington. With the advent of the Obama administration, however, both are realizing that the United States has new priorities that do not fit so comfortably with their own.

All three parties say there will have to be a comprehensive Strategic Defence Review (SDR) following the election.

Turkey's high-profile role in Iran nuclear negotiations is in keeping with an increasingly robust foreign policy that stretches from Congo to Russia to Latin America and seeks to include everything in between. Davutoglu is a key architect of NATO ally Turkey's broadening influence, which includes a "zero problems with neighbors" policy."This is a beautiful symptom of Turkey's overall foreign policy: build as many networks as possible and put themselves in the middle," said Stephen Walt

the opportunity of its location - a crossroads for centuries between East and West, and North and South, for people, ideas, trade, and now energy routes.

Turkey-Africa trade has jumped from $1.5 billion in 2001 to more than $10 billion last year

Egyptian officials expressing alarm about a move by the U.S. Senate to link military aid to Egypt’s performance as a democracy. The Senate bill would withhold up to $1.3 billion in U.S. aid for 2012 until the secretary of state certifies that Egypt has held democratic elections and is protecting freedoms of the press, expression and association.

The Egyptians say that they will hold free elections but that the Senate measure sends a bad signal at a delicate time. The military is in power during the run-up to elections, a turbulent period that has included continued protests and an attack by demonstrators on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo.“If you insert new conditions, hinting at the fact the military aid might be touched in the future, this signals to the Egyptian military [that] the United States is not as solidly behind us as we think,” the Egyptian official said.

Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah has held talks with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt over the formation of a national unity government in Lebanon.

"Both sides agreed on the need to overcome as soon as possible the obstacles hindering the formation of a new government," the two heavyweight politicians said in a joint statement.

Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has been trying to form a national unity government since June, when his Western-backed March 14 Alliance won a parliamentary election.

Some inside the White House have cited Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese political movement, as an example of what the Taliban could become. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, but the group has political support within Lebanon and participates, sometimes through intimidation, in the political process. Some White House advisers have noted that although Hezbollah is a source of regional instability, it is not a threat to the United States. The senior administration official said the Hezbollah example has not been cited specifically to President Obama and has been raised only informally outside the Situation Room meetings.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that "there is clearly a difference between" the Taliban and "an entity that, through a global, transnational jihadist network, would seek to strike the U.S. homeland." "I think the Taliban are, obviously, exceedingly bad people that have done awful things," Gibbs said. "Their capability is somewhat different, though, on that continuum of transnational threats."

Iran and three world powers have been handed a draft agreement aimed at reducing international concerns over Tehran's nuclear programme.

International Atomic Energy Agency, which proposed the plan after talks in Vienna, wants an answer by Friday.

plan is believed to involve Iran exporting uranium to be enriched in France and Russia.

Iran will stage large-scale air defense war games next week to help protect its nuclear facilities against any attack, a senior commander said Saturday,

suggested Iran could itself produce an advanced missile defense system which Russia has so far failed to deliver to the Islamic Republic and which Washington and Israel do not want Tehran to have.

Iran believes Russia's delay in supplying high-grade S-300 missiles was due pressure by Israel, not technical problems as cited by Moscow, Mighani said.

Congress is in effect siding with Morocco, which claims historic sovereignty over its southern half and has proposed an autonomy plan. Native Sahrawi activists, backed by neighboring Algeria, want a referendum on independence as promised by the United Nations a quarter century ago.

Thrust into the debate, the State Department has opted to thread the needle by focusing its efforts on democracy-building. In a letter explaining its approach to the congressional mandate, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Julia Frifield made clear that the $1 million grant “does not reflect a change” in the Obama administration’s policy of supporting a “peaceful, sustainable and mutually agreed solution to the conflict.” "This program will address the legitimate needs of the people of the Western Sahara,” Frifield wrote in a Dec. 23 letter to Rep. Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and the top Sahrawi advocate in Congress. “It will seek to strengthen civil society organizations and local representative bodies to bolster the ability of citizens to play an active role in making decisions that affect their lives.”

Mouloud Said, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’s US envoy, said Moroccan lobbyists have been trying to legitimize Rabat’s administration of the region ever since the 2004 trade deal with the United States excluded the Western Sahara. With the new program, he said, they’re one step closer to that goal. “This sort of program is very welcome once we find a solution to the conflict. But this is not the right moment,” Said told Al-Monitor in a phone interview. “It’s not a good idea because the real Sahrawi civil society is not going to be a part of it. They understand that this is a game by Moroccans to try to legitimize their occupation by getting the US involved through what appears to be an innocent and genuine program — which is everything but genuine or innocent.”

For Sykes, the Allies’ victory in World War One and Zionist ambitions were interlinked. His intent was to secure a strategic base for Britain in the Middle East in the aftermath of the war, thus revealing yet another debate as to whether Sykes was pro-Zionist or cynically using Zionism to secure British and his own interests. The author leans towards the latter. However, it is clear that whatever philosophy Sykes harboured, the Palestinians were merely a pawn in the game and forced into subjugation for a simple reason. If the British had consulted Palestinians over the colonisation of their land, a revolt would have been a natural result. Berdine describes such a reaction as “an inconvenient fact” for Sykes, had his plans been revealed to the indigenous population

Edwin Montagu, British Secretary of State for India and an opponent of the Balfour Declaration. Montagu — the only Jew in the Cabinet when the infamous declaration was written — warned against the British government’s willingness to accommodate more than “liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs.”

Bolton recalled that former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said that Yemen’s 1990 vote against the authorization of force against the then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be the most expensive vote they ever cast. “And we did cut their foreign aid,” Bolton said. “And there needs to be more of that.”

“The goodwill that the U.S. has in the world has largely been the result of the perception of international good citizenship,”

two radically different conceptions of Russian power have emerged. Within the Beltway, many analysts have come to understand the Russian demonstration of power and influence in the Middle East as an indicator that the global rivalry between Washington and Moscow of the past is also the present and future. Yet there also remains a small group of dissenters — Russia specialists, former U.S. officials, and journalists — to this view. They believe the Russians are actually quite weak, financially strapped, and caught in Syria. The best they can say is that Putin is playing a bad hand well

it’s payback time for almost three decades of Moscow’s humiliation. And what better place to start than the Middle East, where the United States is already widely resented even among its allies

Since Moscow’s demonstration of strength (with Iran’s help) in Syria, the Russians have asserted themselves as a credible alternative to the Americans with traditional U.S. allies. With arms sales, economic deals, and diplomatic maneuvering, Russia has been effective in pulling Turkey and Egypt away from the United States, though not completely, and closer to Russia’s orbit

President Trump, the Pentagon, and the State Department made conflicting statements about U.S. involvement in Syria on Thursday

President Trump: "We'll be coming out of Syria like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon, very soon we're coming out."Pentagon: "Important work remains to ensure the lasting defeat these violent extremists....We cannot allow our focus to deviate from the most important task of eliminating ISIS from the region...We will continue to support the SDF." State Department: Spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she is unaware of any plans to pull the U.S. out of Syria. Former Secretary Rex Tillerson said at the beginning of the year that the U.S. should have a long-term military presence in the region.

Pompeo delivered a speech that lacked any overarching policy message. Pompeo did spell out what this administration sees as the main problems in the region: the Islamic Republic of Iran, radical Islamist terrorism, and even the policies of the Obama administration. But he failed to outline a coherent vision, strategy, or policy approach for addressing these problems

To many, Pompeo confirmed widespread fears that the Trump administration simply lacks seriousness of purpose in the Middle East. The speech strongly resembled the rhetoric of many of the region’s own authoritarian regimes—full of bluster, hyperbolic language, attacks on political rivals, and boasts of the administration’s tremendous policy successes that felt divorced from reality

The Trump administration played up Pompeo’s remarks as a big deal, but a clear policy roadmap and announcements of any new initiatives were missing. The language on Syria, the most newsworthy topic, did little to end confusion over U.S. policy. The speech’s vacuity likely is because President Trump is simply not interested in the Middle East, and is known to make sudden foreign policy declarations on Twitter. Pompeo seemingly had little policy substance to work with and probably didn’t want to get out ahead of his boss

His niece, Blanche Dugdale, who worked in the London office of the Jewish Agency with Chaim Weizmann, indicated that Balfour was a Christian Zionist in her autobiography: “Balfour’s interest in the Jews and their history was lifelong, originating in the Old Testament training of his mother, and his Scottish upbringing.”

others argue that Balfour was an anti-Semite and that his interests in the Zionist project were merely for British strategic gains

optimism is raging about the potential energy bounty lying underneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea. But energy development could as easily become a casualty as the cure for the region’s tortured geopolitics

Lebanon and Israel are at daggers drawn over new plans for exploration in offshore gas fields in disputed waters, and Hezbollah is using the energy dispute to ratchet up rhetoric against Israel. And this month, a Turkish naval ship intercepted an exploration vessel working in waters off Cyrus, threatening to escalate tensions between the Greek and Turkish halves of the divided island.

Israel’s first two gas fields are running at full speed, and two more could see investment decisions this year, notes Nikos Tsafos, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Meanwhile, Egypt brought the Zohr field, its own mammoth gas discovery, online in record time, which promises to ease a cash crunch in Cairo aggravated by importing pricey gas.

A dispute between Turkey and the United States over control of a north Syrian town has put the NATO allies on opposing sides of the conflict’s front line, deepening a diplomatic rift ahead of a visit to Turkey by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Turkish and U.S. troops, deployed alongside local fighters, have carved out rival areas of influence on Syria’s northern border. To Ankara’s fury, Washington allied itself with a force led by the Kurdish YPG, a militia which Turkey says is commanded by the same leaders overseeing an insurgency in its southeast.

Washington says it has no plans to withdraw its soldiers from Manbij, and two U.S. commanders visited the town last week to reinforce that message