Banning commercial banks from high-risk trading would cut down on "too-big-to-fail" institutions and help protect the economy from further financial crises according to Barack Obama's economic guru, Paul Volcker, who today rejected opposition from Wall Street over a wholesale regulatory crackdown.

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt ­warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish ­majority or an "apartheid" regime.

 Iran is willing to satisfy the UN and send its uranium abroad for further enrichment, the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told state television last night.

This isn't "defense."

The new budget from the White House will push US military spending well above $2 billion a day.

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq's monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves -- more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran -- including the quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

Leaders of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel warned this week that they were facing an unprecedented campaign of persecution, backed by the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stop their political activities.

A global deal to tackle climate change is all but impossible in 2010, leaving the scale and pace of action to slow global warming in coming decades uncertain, according to senior figures across the world involved in the negotiations.

Washington - The nation owes a substantial debt to Justice Samuel Alito for his display of unhappiness over President Obama's criticisms of the Supreme Court's recent legislation -- excuse me, decision -- opening our electoral system to a new torrent of corporate money.

Over the past dozen years, the US has experienced a series of dangerous and costly systemic failures throughout our security and regulatory framework. The unfettered bubble in technology, missed opportunities to prevent 9/11 - leading to two ongoing wars, the tragic response to Katrina, the largest financial crisis in history, the Fort Hood massacre and the "underwear bomber" incident on Christmas Day all share one commonality.

At the Sundance Festival, American documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney recounts the descent into hell of the former lobbyist with links to the Republican Party, Jack Abramoff, offering an indictment of the corruption that infects political financing in the United States.