US. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, released on January 28, marks the effective end of the Oslo era of Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. It makes no reference to international law or to a mutually binding commitment to international resolutions aimed at ending the conflict. It ignores the commitments made by both sides under existing agreements, and it builds on none of the progress made by American, Israeli, and Palestinian negotiators over the past 20 years. Instead, it proposes a real estate transaction: Israel receives a large chunk of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and the Palestinians receive financial compensation; their…

The sheer density of protracted conflicts in the Black Sea region makes it particularly exposed to the geopolitical ambitions of regional and global powers. The rapid militarization in Russia-controlled territories in recent years has only added fuel to the fire, dramatically increasing security concerns and underscoring the need for the West and its allies in the region to address the so-called frozen conflicts. Russia’s approach Russia benefits from the protracted conflicts in the Black Sea region in various ways, but its military interests are paramount. The dissolution of the Soviet Union reduced the area in which Russian forces could operate,…

And as with Vietnam and Iraq, the results were costly and disillusioning. Although U.S. forces entered the fight in large numbers only weeks before the armistice in November 1918, American deaths exceeded 116,000—this when the total U.S. population was less than one third what it is today. Happy to accept American help in defeating the Hun, British and French leaders wasted little time once the fighting had stopped in rejecting Wilson’s grandiose vision of a peaceful world order based on his famous Fourteen Points. By the time the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty, in November 1919 and again in March…

Woolwich Crown Court is designed to impose the power of the state. Normal courts in this country are public buildings, deliberately placed by our ancestors right in the centre of towns, almost always just up a few steps from a main street. The major purpose of their positioning and of their architecture was to facilitate public access in the belief that it is vital that justice can be seen by the public. Woolwich Crown Court, which hosts Belmarsh Magistrates Court, is built on totally the opposite principle. It is designed with no other purpose than to exclude the public. Attached…

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan urged for those in America's intelligence community to not give up and continue to carry out their jobs amid President Trump's plans to shake up the apparatus.   "I’m hoping that the intelligence professionals are going to continue to do their best to provide the intelligence and the analysis that the executive branch, as well as legislative branch, needs," Brennan told MSNBC on Friday. "They need to try to do it despite the headwinds they’re feeling coming from the White House. A lot of these individuals, I’m sure, are being intimidated and now…