The trillion-dollar question in the "Arab Winter" is who will blink first in the West's screenplay of slouching towards Tehran via Damascus.

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran's undisputed key ally in the Arab world - while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia's one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system - one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot - in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

Iran's parliament has voted to expel the British ambassador in Tehran in retaliation against economic sanctions imposed by the west over the Islamic republic's disputed nuclear programme.

Iranian MPs on Sunday passed a bill that in effect gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government two weeks to expel the ambassador, Dominick Chilcott.

The bill, which also requires Iran's economic and trade links with the UK to be reduced, has yet to be approved by the Guardian Council, the powerful body of clerics and lawyers that vets parliamentary activity.

If the bill comes into effect, diplomatic relations between Tehran and London will be downgraded from ambassadorial level to that of chargé d'affaires and Chilcott - who took up his post only a few weeks ago - will have to leave Tehran. Iran's embassy in London had been operating without an ambassador for several months.

Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad says he will be unable to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of civil servants due to Israel's withholding of tax revenues it collects on behalf of PA.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad says he will be unable to pay the the salaries of tens of thousands of civil servants, as Israeli economic sanctions start to bite.

Israel decided last month to suspend the monthly transfer of about $100 million in tax revenues it collects on behalf of Fayyad's Palestinian Authority. The transfers, along with foreign aid, are crucial for keeping Fayyad's government afloat.

General Yadollah Javano of the Revolutionary Guards says that Iran could attack any part of Israel in response to an Israeli strike on Iran.

An Iranian general on Saturday threatened retaliation against Israel if any of its nuclear or security sites are attacked.

"If Israeli missiles hit one of our nuclear facilities or other vital centers, then they should know that any part of Israeli territory would be target of our missiles, including their nuclear sites," General Yadollah Javani of the Revolutionary Guards told ISNA news agency.

"They (Israel) know that we have the capability to do so."

Javani, the former head of the military's political department, was referring to mounting speculation that Israel would strike Iran's nuclear facilities after the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had tested designs used to make nuclear warheads.

Iran will target elements of NATO missile defense network in Turkey if attacked, Iran's Mehr News agency said citing a senior military commander.

"If we are threatened, initially we are prepared to target the NATO missile shields in Turkey and then we will target other places," Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Aerospace Force, said on Saturday.

Turkey agreed in September to host a U.S. early warning radar in the southeast of the country as part of NATO's missile defense network. The radar is aimed at countering ballistic missile threats from Iran.

The United States has decided to disengage itself from certain obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE). In particular, the USA will no longer inform Russia about plans connected with the redeployment of its forces. Those restrictions are not touching upon any other country.

"Today the United States announced in Vienna, Austria, that it would cease carrying out certain obligations under the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty with regard to Russia. This announcement in the CFE Treaty's implementation group comes after the United States and NATO Allies have tried over the past 4 years to find a diplomatic solution following Russia's decision in 2007 to cease implementation with respect to all other 29 CFE States. Since then, Russia has refused to accept inspections and ceased to provide information to other CFE Treaty parties on its military forces as required by the Treaty," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Tuesday.

...

The remarks from the US diplomat look like another attempt to turn everything upside down again. It is worth mentioning here that the first version of the CFE Treaty was signed in 1990, during the existence of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The document stipulated a reduction of the number of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery (larger than 100 mm in caliber), combat planes and helicopters, as well as information exchange.

May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France in the April 2012 elections. Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York on a charge of sexual assault. He would then be indicted by a grand jury on seven counts of attempted rape, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment, placed under house arrest for over a month, and, two weeks before all the charges were dismissed by the prosecutor on August 23, 2011, sued for sexual abuse by the alleged victim.

He knew he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phones - which he called his IMF BlackBerry. This was the phone he used to send and receive texts and e-mails - including for both personal and IMF business. According to several sources who are close to DSK, he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy's center-right political party. She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.¹ It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.

At 10:07 AM he called his wife in Paris on his IMF BlackBerry, and in a conversation that lasted about six minutes told her he had a big problem. He asked her to contact a friend, Stéphane Fouks, who could come to his home on the Place des Vosges and who could arrange to have both his BlackBerry and iPad examined by an expert in such matters. He had no time to do anything about it that morning. He had scheduled an early lunch with his twenty-six-year-old daughter Camille, a graduate student at Columbia, who wanted to introduce him to her new boyfriend. After that, he had to get to JFK Airport in time to catch his 4:40 PM flight to Paris.

I will assume that if you are taking a few minutes to read this article you are, like me, more or less a news addict. Every day you wake up and while fixing breakfast you turn on the radio and a laptop to check what is up with this world. As you eat you protest at the comments that come through the airwaves and correct every attempt at subtle propaganda, although sometimes you just have to laugh. Meanwhile you compare the radio broadcast with what is coming through the net in alternative news websites such as Sott.net. You also check out Facebook or some other social media site where you have a number of friends who are also into hunting interesting news items, so you want to see what they have spotted in the last twelve hours.

A week ago I had a surreal moment while reading headlines on Facebook. It was the clear impression that the world had indeed gone mad - and not in a harmless or amusing mad way, but in a cruel and soul-less way. Among the things that caught my eye:

• 10-Year-Old Survives Life Threatening Complications To Give Birth To Son Prematurely Likely a victim of rape.
• House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable To 'Prevent Overly Burdensome' School Lunch Regulations. They grow on trees, you would think.
• How the Telecom Industry Seeks to Confuse About the Dangers of Cell Phones. "From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use."
• TSA Puts Off Safety Study of X-ray Body Scanners. At least they are backtracking in Europe. But what harms Europeans is OK for Americans?
• Seattle Police pepper-spray 84-year-old woman and pregnant teen. Because they can.

It is these sort of shocking items that make us feel that urge to understand how and why. What is the point of it all? What is the bigger picture? Horror moves us to seek knowledge, which is why I have been thinking lately about the main lines of force in the current state of global affairs. The way I see it, the major interrelated threads are the economic crisis, revolutions, imperialism and climate change. The first three are like standing lines of dominoes about to collapse. The last one can 'rain' down on us at any point - in fact it already has, but how strongly will it be when it does again?

Israel warned on Saturday that it would cut the supply of water and electricity to the Gaza Strip if rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas form a unity government.

"The foreign ministry is examining the possibility of Israel pulling out of the Gaza Strip in terms of infrastructure," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the daily Yediot Aharonot website.

A unity government deal "would transform the Palestinian Authority into a terrorist authority and would put an end to any hope for a peace agreement" with Israel, said Ayalon, who is also a Knesset deputy from the nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party.

On Friday, Israeli ministers decided to maintain a freeze on the transfer of tens of millions of dollars in tax monies to the Palestinian Authority hours after Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas held top-level talks with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal at which they announced a new era of "partnership."

The transfer of funds, which make up a large percentage of the authority's monthly budget, was frozen on November 1 as a punitive measure after the Palestinians won full membership of the UN cultural organisation.

Thousands of Palestinians rallied on Friday all over the Gaza Strip in protest to the Israeli measures in East Jerusalem.

Called on by the Islamic Hamas movement, which rules the coastal enclave, and the less influential Islamic Jihad (Holy War) movement, two separate demonstrations took place in the Gaza Strip.

Coinciding with rallies to support Jerusalem in both Jordan and Egypt, demonstrators in the Gaza Strip called on the Muslim and Arab nations to move as quickly as possible to rescue the holy city of Jerusalem, saying that Jerusalem is an Arab city and will remain so.

The Al-Aqsa Association for Waqf and Islamic Heritage in Jerusalem had earlier warned in a statement of the recent Israeli measures in East Jerusalem to change the characteristics of the city, mainly destroying the temporary woody bridge near the Mughrabi Gate and building a new bridge. Also, Israel decided late October to demolish an access ramp to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.