Uri Avnery For decades, my friends and I have warned that if we dither in making peace, the nature of the conflict will change. I myself have written dozens of times that if our conflict is transformed from a national to a religious struggle, everything will change for the worse. The Zionist-Arab struggle started as a clash between two great national movements, which were born more or less at the same time ...

The Air Force has launched a rocket from Cape Canaveral carrying a top-secret spy satellite, which analysts believe has the ability to see through clouds and bad weather. An unmanned Atlas V rocket carrying the classified device rose from its seaside Florida pad successfully following an aborted launch on Monday that was foiled by a problem with the environmental control system. It is believed to be the sec ...

With the war there officially "ended" and most of our troops back home, Iraq isn't getting much ink these days. But the story is far from over. Indeed, according to Wadah Khanfar, former director general of Al Jazeera, Iraq is still the most important story in the Middle East -- with a far greater impact on the region's future than Syria. "Nobody's paying attention to Iraq anymore," he told me during dinner ...

President Obama is still vastly more popular internationally than his predecessor, George W. Bush, but after three and a half years of his presidency world opinion of US policy has fallen sharply, according to the 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey released on Wednesday.  In particular, Obama's drone program in foreign nations -- including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia -- has fueled mistrust and a ...

By David Ignatius The Iran nuclear negotiations may not be headed toward a dead end in Moscow next week, as feared. Iran’s top negotiator has said he is ready to “engage on the proposal” from Western nations for Iran to export its supply of 20 percent-enriched uranium as a first step toward a broader nuclear deal. Saeed Jalili, the Iranian chief representative in the talks, made the comment in a phone conve ...

More than 70 people are feared to have been killed in Afghanistan after a landslide triggered by a double earthquake buried homes under earth and rock, officials said Tuesday. Two shallow quakes less than half an hour apart shook the mountainous Hindu Kush region on Monday, starting a slide of debris that smashed into a remote village, burying mudbrick houses to a depth of up to 100 metres (300 feet). In Bu ...

Last week, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that NATO had inked a deal to move its equipment and vehicles out of Afghanistan via the so-called “Northern Distribution Network,” or NDN. NATO thinks this northern evacuation route gives them a way to wind down the war without having to rely on Pakistan. NATO is overselling this new deal. While the NDN certainly lessens the need for Pakista ...

LinkedIn Hacked by Russian hackers - 6.5 mln passwords compromised A large set of LinkedIn passwords have reportedly been posted on a Russian hacker web forum, landing millions of accounts in danger of being cracked. ­Thus far, most passwords remain encrypted – the hackers who stole the data asked their “colleagues” to help decipher the files. However, the encryption is quite easy to break, so the users mus ...