The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has visited Israel/Palestine no fewer than 15 times in the past 15 months - and has virtually nothing to show for it. Her diplomacy has been an exercise in futility.

 

THERE is a certain symmetry to the departure of Yossi Harel, who recently died at 90 in Tel Aviv, and the arrival of Israel’s 60th birthday. Harel was the commander of a battered, second-hand ship that he renamed “Exodus” and sailed into legend.

 

WHEN the Israeli army killed James Miller, the British producer who was making a film about the Palestinian children under Israeli occupation, the Israelis, at the time, claimed that the Palestinians killed him.

 

During much of the Cold War, the typical American spy - spy for the enemy, that is - was a single, native-born, high-school-educated white male in his 20s, employed by a branch of the military and with top-secret security clearance.

 

These are dangerously unsettled times in the Middle East. There are so many bitter scores to settle, so much violent dissension, such implacable hatreds, that it would take only a spark to set the whole region alight. Or so it would seem. Many observers predict a hot and bloody summer.

 

We have inherited a single planet. But what have we made of it? The Earth is today an endangered heritage, and the species itself is at risk.

 

WHEN Barack Obama’s Indonesian classmates are asked to recall the boy they all called “Barry” (pronounced “Berry”), their description is unanimous: “chubby.”

 

The capital of Pakistan celebrated the progress of the Olympic torch through it on April 16 with pageantry that reassured China that the indignities inflicted on it in London and Paris were as much an affront to its people as to the Chinese. It was just a day after President General (retired) Pervez Musharraf's return from a six-day visit to China.

 

Yemen is the geographic, strategic, humane and security background of the GCC states," President Ali Abdullah Saleh told the visiting Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Al Attiyah a few days ago.

 

Yemen wants to grow its economy by joining the GCC. It would do better to adopt the economic model of liberalising North African states.

 

SANA, Yemen: When the Yemeni authorities released a convicted Qaeda terrorist named Jamal al-Badawi from prison last October, American officials were furious. Badawi helped plan the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, in which 17 American sailors were killed.

 

For many years, Yemen’s had a shady relationship with Islamic militants. In the late 1980s, they welcomed thousands of Afghani-trained mujahideen into the country and, in 1994, President Ali Abdullah Saleh (left) used his connections to such militant factions in order to suppress a brief north-south civil war.