NEW YORK - The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon has protested to Israel after it observed increased violations of Lebanese air space by Israel, which carried out raids in Syria to target what it claimed were Iranian missiles bound for Hizbullah.

The controversy over Iran’s nuclear activities has at least as much to do with the future of international order as it does with nonproliferation. For this reason, all of the BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] have much at stake in how the Iranian nuclear issue is handled.

Lakhdar Brahimi announced on April 17th that he wants to be exclusively the special envoy of the United Nations to Syria and not have the joint role of UN-Arab League envoy to the country. He felt that seating the opposition delegation as the representative of Syria at the Arab League summit in Doha might have compromised his position in the sense that the Arab League is no longer in tune with the mandate that the UN provided. Apparently, Brahimi felt that the seating of the opposition compromised the Arab League component of his mission and minimized his ability to mediate effectively.

Following President Barack Obama’s address to an audience of Israeli students in Jerusalem last month, progressive commentators in the United States hailed the speech as “a passionate appeal for peace” that “placed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict squarely back on his agenda.” But those intoxicated by Obama’s rhetoric will soon experience a painful hangover. For the President’s Israel speech and the rest of his Middle East trip were focused, first and foremost, on domestic politics here in the United States.

TEL AVIV - An Israeli decision to transfer its military brigades from the Syrian border to the Lebanese suggests that Israel is preparing for a new war in the north.

“Hi Papa .. Don’t worry about me too much, right now I am most concerned that we are not being effective. I still don’t feel particularly at risk. Rafah has seemed calmer lately,” Rachel Corrie wrote to her father, Craig, from Rafah, a town located at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.