Jordan's King Abdullah drew a red line on the plan that the Trump administration is expected to unveil to attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling White House senior adviser Jared Kushner Wednesday it must be based on a two-state solution that gives Palestinians a capital in East Jerusalem.

Kushner is traveling in Morocco, Jordan and Israel this week to meet with officials and drum up support for the long-awaited plan's economic portion, which will be unveiled during a June conference in Bahrain.

King Abdullah, who acts as custodian of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, has not committed to attend the conference.

A single image epitomizes the hurricane at the center of the current geopolitical chessboard: an extremely affectionate handshake between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

The image crystallizes the stuff of nightmares by those in the US that still follow the Eurasian prophecies of Halford Mackinder and his disciples, such as the late Zbigniew "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, that focused on the imperative of preventing the emergence of a peer competitor in Eurasia.

The peer competitor has emerged, in full: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

On Wednesday, Xi said at the Kremlin this was his eighth trip to Russia since 2013 - when the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), were announced. And he added he and Putin had met "almost 30 times" since then.

A tree that was brought to the United States from a forest in the French department of Ain in 2018 during President Macron's tour was supposed to be planted in front of the White House and symbolise the strength of ties between Paris and Washington.

According to Le Figaro newspaper, the oak tree that President Trump planted on the lawn near the White House in April 2018 has died. The report specifies that the site where the tree was supposed to grow is now empty.

The tree originated from a forest in the French Ain department, where thousands of US Marines died during World War I and was deemed to be a sign of strong French-US ties when it grew.

The sanctions imposed by the US against Iranian petrochemical companies prove that Mike Pompeo's earlier promise of negotiations without preconditions was nothing but a bluff, a senior Iranian diplomat said.

On Friday, the US Treasury announced it has imposed a new wave of sanctions against Iranian energy businesses. The move is meant to stifle the revenues of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Washington declared a terrorist organization earlier in April. This proves that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an empty promise to Tehran less than a week ago, when he said he was ready to start "a conversation with no preconditions," a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.

Pompeo's words were "deceitful, untrue and merely in service of appealing to the public opinion," Abbas Mousavi said as cited by Iran's Mehr News Agency. He called the sanctions an act of "economic terrorism" and said Tehran will not yield to Washington's pressure.

Australia got scary in a hurry.
One day after raiding the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst over the publication of leaked documents detailing the government's domestic surveillance plans, the Australian Federal Police raided ABC News Australia over leaked documents detailing the killing of unarmed civilians by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.

Somewhat surprisingly, the AFP did not prevent John Lyons, the executive editor of ABC News, from live-tweeting the entire raid. This resulted in an astounding stream of tweets (with photos!) showing the AFP was seeking a wealth of information from ABC offices, including notes, correspondence, reports, briefing documents, photographs, and anything else it could use to (presumably) find the source of the leaks.

The AFP claims the raid of the ABC offices has nothing to do with its raid of a journalist's home the previous day. This is only true in the sense that two different sets of leaks were targeted. In the greater scheme of things, they are very definitely related, as is the investigation currently being pursued by the Department of Home Affairs targeting yet another journalist over a story about asylum seekers seeking to enter Australia by boat.

Journalists all over the world are shocked by the Australian government's actions, which directly threaten press freedom in that country. The continuing expansion of its national security powers have reduced the rights of the country's citizens. These powers are on full public display, being utilized in an incredibly damaging way.

An important conference occurred from May 15-16 in Beijing which was missed by much of the Western press. Titled "Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations", leading heads of state, ministers and business representatives from all Asian countries converged to discuss the organizing principles of the new system being created by China's Belt and Road Initiative. The event was designed to refute the toxic concept that civilizations are destined to clash.

President Xi Jinping set the tone for the event stating in the opening speech: "The intensifying global challenges humanity is facing now require concerted efforts from countries across the world." In his presentation he discussed the importance of the new paradigm of win-win cooperation now unfolding and discussed the importance of transcending the "each against all" paradigm which threatens civilization's very existence.

Xi made the point that cultures must focus on a higher principle of beauty if we will succeed in this endeavor when he said:

"We need to uphold the beauty of each civilization and the diversity of civilizations in the world. Each civilization is the crystallization of human creation, and each is beautiful in its own way. The aspiration for all that is beautiful is a common pursuit of humanity that nothing can hold back. Civilizations don't have to clash with each other; what is needed are eyes to see the beauty in all civilizations. We should keep our own civilizations dynamic and create conditions for other civilizations to flourish. Together we can make the garden of world civilizations colorful and vibrant."

"History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is 'one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.'"-Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)

What the First Amendment protects-and a healthy constitutional republic requires-are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

What the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don't talk back, don't challenge government authority, don't speak out against government misconduct, and don't step out of line.

For those who refuse to meekly accept the heavy-handed tyranny of the police state, the danger is all too real.

We live in an age in which "we the people" are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to "serve and protect."

As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent approach to the semi-crisis in Yekaterinburg was 'Putin the balancer' in action. Although I had written several pieces recently asking whether Putin might be losing his touch in, or perhaps even his desire to continue balancing Russia's sundry political forces opposed, partially opposed, sometimes opposed, etc. to each other along every parameter related to Russian politics. Specifically, there was some evidence he was turning to the right and allowing the siloviki to get rougher with the liberal democratic opposition. However, I did not conclude that he had lost the balancing touch that I have argued repeatedly has guided his soft authoritarian method for ruling Russia.

In the end, the semi-crisis played out as many Russian small and major crises under 'Putin the balancer' have. One needs only to recall the compromise with St. Petersburg opposition to the GazProm construction project for the historical city center a few years back or the administration's much more recent, but somehow forgotten compromise on raising the pension age after the government's proposals were met with concern and some public protests. The Yekaterinburg semi-crisis pitted the Russian Orthodox Church and the city's mayor, who proposed and began to break ground on the construction of new church in central city square, against a very local movement with a largely youth-oriented set of demonstrators, who opposed the project referring the retention of the pen square and neighboring green area that locals used for walking babies and dogs and general strolling about.

As the week-long demonstrations began to get aggressive, with activists tearing down the fence that cordoned off the construction area and police beginning to react with use some physical force and arrests to put down the protests, Putin broke his silence. He weighed in on the side of those who proposed conducting a public opinion survey to decide the issue. Those closer to the demonstrations proposed either cancelling construction or, more moderately, holding a referendum. Several Russian commentators from the liberal democratic opposition as well as Western observers asserted as the crisis mounted that if a opinion survey (or a referendum for that matter) was conducted, then it simply would be falsified, and construction would proceed and if necessary the protests would be violently suppressed. This was the nature of the regime as had been proven over and over again, they said.

What happened? The opinion survey was conducted, and some 70 percent of residents opposed construction. As a result construction at this site has been cancelled. We have not heard many mea culpas from these experts.

As Donald Trump cozies up to the hardline Israeli right-wingers, it seems that support for a sensible Middle East policy is in decline. But a number of the US' European allies seem to be beginning to break ranks with Washington.

On May 30, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced plans to build several hundred new residential buildings in the Pisgat Ze'ev and Ramot neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Both areas are located in the illegally occupied East of the city, which was seized in the June 1967 war. The UN has consistently condemned such settlements as a violation of international law. However, western governments, led by the US, have for decades been turning a blind eye.

Huawei has signed a deal with Russian telecoms firm MTS to develop 5G technology in Russia.

The companies will develop next-generation 5G networks in Russia over the next year, reports said.

The deal was agreed as China's President Xi Jinping began a three-day visit to Russia.

It comes as some Western countries, led by the US, have blocked the Chinese firm on concerns it poses a national security risk.

The deal will see "the development of 5G technologies and the pilot launch of fifth generation networks in 2019 and 2020," MTS said in a statement, according to AFP.