Report states that the EU has become disenchanted with the diplomatic process in its traditional format - direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians - because they doubt its ability to lead to a solution.

The European Union will step up efforts to pressure Israel and the Palestinians into an agreement in 2013, an internal Foreign Ministry document predicts.

The report, which was compiled following last month's UN vote to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state and subsequent European protests over Israel's approval of new construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, states that the Europeans may try to promote the establishment of an actual Palestinian state independent of negotiations with Israel.

Foreign Ministry officials this week began discussing an evaluation to be presented to the new government after the January 22 election. The feeling in the ministry is that Israel's status has deteriorated badly over the past four years, particularly in the European Union. Ministry officials attribute the decline to the lack of progress in the peace process and Israel's response to the Palestinians' UN bid, particularly the wave of settlement construction.

Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights - ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution - will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed through the Senate an amendment to the 2013 version of the NDAA. The amendment, although deeply flawed, at least made a symbolic attempt to restore the right to due process and trial by jury. A House-Senate conference committee led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., however, removed the amendment from the bill last week.

"I was saddened and disappointed that we could not take a step forward to ensure at the very least American citizens and legal residents could not be held in detention without charge or trial," Feinstein said in a statement issued by her office. "To me that was a no-brainer."

You've got to be careful when Syria's rebels are perpetually "closing in"

Remember the days when we thought Egypt's path to democracy was a done deal? Western-trained Mohamed Morsi had invited the people to come and meet him in Hosni Mubarak's former presidential palace, the old military toffs in the "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces" had been pensioned off and the International Monetary Fund was waiting to bestow some of those cruel deprivations upon Egypt that would ready it for our financial benevolence. How happy the Middle East optimists were by mid-2012.

Next door, Libya produced a victory for nice, pro-Western secularist Mahmoud Jibril, promising freedom, stability, a new home for the West in one of the Arab world's most fecund oil producers. It was a place where even US diplomats could wander around virtually unprotected.

Tunisia may have an Islamist party running its government, but it was a "moderate" administration - in other words, we thought it would do what we wanted - while the Saudis and the Bahraini autocracy, with the purse-lipped support of Messrs Obama and Cameron, quietly suppressed what was left of the Shia uprising which threatened to remind us all that democracy was not really welcome among the wealthiest Arab states. Democracy was for the poor.

China says it is on alert after Japan dispatched fighter jets over the East China Sea.

Japanese media report Japan sent F15 fighter aircraft after detecting a Chinese marine surveillance plane in disputed airspace near contested islands in the East China Sea.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Tuesday Beijing will pay close attention to Japan's decision to dispatch fighter jets. She said China's surveillance plane was conducting routine patrols at the time.

The Jerusalem district planning committee has granted approval to build another 1,200 housing units in Gilo, expanding the Jewish neighborhood built on Jerusalem-area land seized by Israel in 1967.

It was the latest in a series of similar development decisions that have followed the United Nations vote in November granting the Palestinian Authority its request for non-member observer state status. Planning committee member Moshe Montag told Israel Radio on Tuesday that the plan had been submitted more than a year ago but that procedures had been blocked for diplomatic reasons -- until now.

"Unfortunately, it takes a drama, terror attack or U.N. vote to release construction in Jerusalem, our capital, and this is absurd," Montag said.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years in exile on Feb. 1, 1979, he set out to destroy the secular opposition forces, including the Communist Party of Iran, which had been instrumental in bringing down the shah. Khomeini's declaration of an Islamic government, supported by referendum, saw him rewrite the constitution, close opposition newspapers and ban opposition groups including the National Democratic Front and the Muslim People's Republican Party. Dissidents who had spent years inside Iran's notoriously brutal prison system under the shah were incarcerated once again by the new regime. Some returned to their cells to be greeted by their old jailers, who had offered their services to the new regime.

This is what is under way in Egypt. It is the story of most revolutions. The moderates, who are crucial to winning the support of the masses and many outside the country, become an impediment to the consolidation of autocratic power. Liberal democrats, intellectuals, the middle class, secularists and religious minorities including Coptic Christians were always seen by President Mohamed Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party - Egypt's de facto political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood - as "useful idiots." These forces were essential to building a broad movement to topple the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. They permitted Western journalists to paint the opposition in their own image. But now they are a hindrance to single-party rule and are being crushed.

At least six militants and two soldiers w ere killed in Yemen on Tuesday in fighting near a damaged oil pipeline east of the capital Sanaa, a defence ministry official and residents said.

Separately, gunmen and bombers targeted three senior military officers and the transport minister in a series of attacks in the capital Sanaa.

In one incident, two gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead Brigadier Fadel Mohammed Ali, an adviser to the minister of defence, outside the ministry's offices in Sanaa, a police source said. Further details were not immediately available.

Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American with the IWPS, documents the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israelis.

A Tunisian man has been questioned by the FBI in connection with the September 11 bombing of the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four diplomats. After months of failed attempts, he was examined as a "witness" - without legal counsel.

­Ali Harzi was extradited to Tunisia after being arrested in Turkey in October, under strong suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attack in which US Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.

He had since refused to be questioned by the FBI without the presence of his lawyer.

"They wanted to interrogate him as a witness, but he has refused," his lawyer Abdelbasset Ben Mbarek explained to AFP, adding that authorities attempted to question him "in secret" without his lawyers.

Fadhel Saihi, an advisor to the Tunisian Justice Ministry, told AFP that Tunisian authorities are cooperating with the US investigation.

However delays with the questioning of Hazri have led to calls for sanctions in the U.S.

In early December Republican representative Frank Wolf urged Congress and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to cut off financial aid to Tunisia until it allowed the FBI to interview Hazri. Tunisia has received over $320 million in US aid since January 2011.

After months of wrangling, the Tunisian court allowed three FBI agents to question Hazri before a judge and through a Moroccan interpreter. Hazri's legal counsel was not allowed to be present, on the basis that he was being questioned as a "witness" and not a defendant.

The United States has carried out more drone strikes this year in Afghanistan than it has during its eight-year-long air war in Pakistan, launching 447 strikes and killing thousands while also reducing its air surveillance.

At a time when the US is transitioning military power to the Afghan government and planning its 2014 withdrawal, it broke a new record with the 447 drone strikes it launched in the war-torn country in 2012. Not only did the US launch more drones this year than ever before, but it carried out more strikes in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan in the past eight years, which is how long the CIA has been conducting such strikes. About 338 drone strikes have been launched in Pakistan.

The data, which was released by the US Air Force, shows that drone strikes have been steadily increasing in Afghanistan, even after former terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 and the conflict has been winding down. Last year, the US carried out 294 drone strikes in Afghanistan, which was up from 278 in 2010.

The average number of drone strikes per month has also been on the rise. This year, the average was 33 drone strikes, while last year, it was 24.5 At the same time, drone strikes have been increasingly criticized by both legislators and the American public.

A December report by the Brave New Foundation condemned the use of drones, which have killed hundreds of children - and possibly many more that were not reported. In Pakistan, 178 children were reportedly killed by US drones,