Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today expressed his shock and outrage at yesterday's attack against the United Kingdom's embassy in Iran and urged the country's authorities to take steps to prevent similar attacks against other diplomatic missions.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today expressed his shock and outrage at yesterday's attack against the United Kingdom's embassy in Iran and urged the country's authorities to take steps to prevent similar attacks against other diplomatic missions.

The United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees said today it has formed a partnership with a renowned architect to build 20 environmentally-friendly schools in the Gaza Strip.

In December a vessel group led by the Northern Fleet’s aircraft carrier “Admiral Kuznetsov” will sail to the Mediterranean and the Russian naval base of Tartus in Syria.

The mission has nothing to do with the deadly violence in Syria between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the opposition, a naval spokesman told Izvestia.

- This was planned already in 2010 when there were no such events there. There has been active preparation and there is no need to cancel this, the spokesman said, adding that "Admiral Kuznetsov" will also visit Beirut, Genoa and Cyprus.

Russia and the West have become deeply split over the situation in Syria, with Moscow insisting that sanctions and pressure against the Assad regime is not the way to solve the crisis....

In December a vessel group led by the Northern Fleet’s aircraft carrier “Admiral Kuznetsov” will sail to the Mediterranean and the Russian naval base of Tartus in Syria.

The mission has nothing to do with the deadly violence in Syria between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the opposition, a naval spokesman told Izvestia.

- This was planned already in 2010 when there were no such events there. There has been active preparation and there is no need to cancel this, the spokesman said, adding that "Admiral Kuznetsov" will also visit Beirut, Genoa and Cyprus.

Russia and the West have become deeply split over the situation in Syria, with Moscow insisting that sanctions and pressure against the Assad regime is not the way to solve the crisis....

The uprising in Syria turned much more violent in the past week and the Bashar al-Assad government is tottering. Civilians have obtained weapons and begun an armed resistance. Syrian soldiers are deserting and forming a Free Syrian Army. While the Arab League on Sunday voted to impose punitive economic and political sanctions on Damascus, fighting is breaking out nationwide between the Sunni majority and Shi'ite minority.

A faltering regime and rising violence often leads to a military coup. They were commonplaces in much of the developing world back in the 1950s and 1960s and a convoluted and incomplete one began in Egypt last fall. Syria is ripe for one now. The Arab League's overwhelming approval of sanctions - the first in its 66-year history - increases pressure on Assad.

Deterioration

The Assad government faces violence from several quarters. Civilians in the opposition are arming themselves with weapons brought in from Lebanese markets and western Iraq by the Muslim Brotherhood and smuggling networks which have attached themselves to insurrectionary movements. Syrian security forces can no longer fire into crowds without fear of facing return fire from rooftops and windows. Nor can they move from town to town without fear of attack.

In recent weeks several thousand soldiers - a precise or even rough figure is not yet clear - have deserted the Syrian army and formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Better trained and equipped than the civilian fighting forces, the FSA are mounting attacks on government buildings in Damascus and pulling off deadly ambushes in between restive cities. The heretofore solid support of the armed forces can no longer be relied upon by the government....

My name is Aron Adler.

I am 25 years old, was born in Brooklyn NY, and raised in Efrat Israel. Though very busy, I don’t view my life as unusual. Most of the time, I am just another Israeli citizen. During the day I work as a paramedic in Magen David Adom, Israel’s national EMS service. At night, I’m in my first year of law school. I got married this October and am starting a new chapter of life together with my wonderful wife Shulamit.

15-20 days out of every year, I’m called up to the Israeli army to do my reserve duty. I serve as a paramedic in an IDF paratrooper unit. My squad is made up of others like me; people living normal lives who step up to serve whenever responsibility calls. The oldest in my squad is 58, a father of four girls and grandfather of two; there are two bankers, one engineer, a holistic healer, and my 24 year old commander who is still trying to figure out what to do with his life. Most of the year we are just normal people living our lives, but for 15-20 days each year we are soldiers on the front lines preparing for a war that we hope we never have to fight.

This year, our reserve unit was stationed on the border between Israel, Egypt and the Gaza Strip in an area called “Kerem Shalom.” Above and beyond the “typical” things for which we train – war, terrorism, border infiltration, etc., – this year we were confronted by a new challenge. Several years ago, a trend started of African refugees crossing the Egyptian border from Sinai into Israel to seek asylum from the atrocities in Darfur.

What started out as a small number of men, women and children fleeing from the machetes of the Janjaweed and violent fundamentalists to seek a better life elsewhere, turned into an organized industry of human trafficking. In return for huge sums of money, sometimes entire life savings paid to Bedouin “guides,” these refugees are promised to be transported from Sudan, Eritrea, and other African countries through Egypt and the Sinai desert, into the safe haven of Israel....

...Most often, wars are won and lost by a faction of a diverse ruling class. Victories validate the winners and what they stand for. Defeats usher in competitors waiting in the wings. So for example, the defeat of Lord North's cabinet in the American Revolutionary War empowered William Pitt the Younger's faction, including Adam Smith. When John F. Kennedy's old-line liberals lost the Vietnam War, their discredit empowered Democratic and Republican successors who embodied an America more collectivist at home and more timid abroad. Such changes, though big, are evolutionary because they simply bring to the fore people and ways that had been gestating within the Establishment.

When, however, the losers are a whole ruling class, and when that class is pervasive enough to have banished to society's margins any people and ideas that diverge from it, its discredit really does put society in a revolutionary situation. For example, the Soviet regime's loss of the Cold War plunged that country into a downward spiral because three generations of Communist rule had utterly destroyed living memory of anything but dysfunctional people and ways.

America's current ruling class, the people who lost the War on Terror, monopolizes the upper reaches of American public life, the ranks of those who make foreign and domestic policy, including the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties. It is more or less homogeneous socially and intellectually. In foreign affairs, the change from the Bush to the Obama Administrations was barely noticeable. In domestic matters, the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. Dissent from the ruling class is rife among the American people, but occurs mostly on the sidelines of our politics. If there is to be a reversal of the ongoing defeats, both foreign and domestic, that have discredited contemporary America's bipartisan mainstream, heretofore marginal people will have to generate it, applying ideas and practices recalled from America's successful past....

There is no single issue on which the United Nations expends more time and energy than its advocacy of the Palestinian cause. It dominates the agendas of various UN bodies, supported by American taxpayer dollars, including the UN Human Rights Council, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The UN’s obsession over Palestine has led to the world body’s repudiation of its own original two-state solution, spurned by all of the Arab countries and the Palestinians themselves back in 1947.

Beginning in 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” on November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its Palestine partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.” The event takes place every year at UN headquarters in New York and at the UN Offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere.

In other words, every November 29th, the United Nations publicly mourns the passage of its own peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute, which had called for the establishment of an independent Arab state and independent Jewish state. Every year the UN commiserates over the adoption by the General Assembly of the 1947 partition resolution under which the Palestinians could have been living in their own independent state for the last sixty-four years if the Arabs had only accepted it. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has conceded that the Arabs’ rejection of the partition resolution was a big mistake, but the day of mourning and grief over the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds go on anyway at the United Nations....

A powerful explosion rattled the Iranian city of Isfahan early Monday evening Iran’s time (late morning EST). Isfahan is Iran’s third largest city, but more importantly, a major nuclear weapons-related facility is located eight miles from Isfahan. The facility is used for processing uranium so it can be fed into uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Iran uses two other facilities, in Natanz and in Qom, to enrich uranium.

This is the second powerful explosion in as many weeks in an Iranian nuclear weapons-related facility. On 12 November, a powerful explosion destroyed a large area in a military facility twenty-five miles west of Tehran. That facility is the center of Iran’s ballistic missiles development work. The explosion, which killed about twenty top commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, including Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, the general who founded and led the country’s missile program, occurred during a demonstration of a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload....