The Palestinians said Tuesday that all of the U.N. Security Council members except the United States will condemn Israel's recent announcements of new settlement construction which are making a two-state solution more difficult to achieve.

Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said the 14 other council members will tell reporters after the council's monthly Mideast meeting on Wednesday that continuing settlement activity is illegal and must be stopped. The United States delivered a rare blunt rebuke to Israel, its top Mideast ally, on Tuesday for its new settlement construction, but Mansour said the Obama administration won't approve a Security Council resolution or statement. He said there is near global unanimity against Israel's actions, pointing to the 169-6 vote in the General Assembly Tuesday on a non-binding resolution condemning settlement activities by Israel and demanding their immediate cessation.

PressTV: Breaking: Israel okays 2,610 new settler units
Jason Ditz: Israel Plans Another 6,000 Settlement Homes
AWIP: Land Grab: Israel approves 1,500 more settlement homes in east Jerusalem

On Nov. 14, an Israeli warhead struck a house in Gaza City and killed an infant, Omar Masharawi, 11 months old. His father Jiwad Masharawi works for BBC in Gaza. A photo of him grieving his son's death, taken by the AP (below), was widely circulated and appeared on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 15. Today the Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton, whom we have praised before for straightforwardness, defends the publication of the photo, saying there were no photos of Israeli child deaths to "balance" this image. And who was complaining? Pexton refers to complaints by "American Jews in large numbers."

[They] asked why The Post didn’t balance the photo of the grieving father with one of Israelis who had lost a loved one from the Gaza rocket fire. That’s a valid question. The answer is that The Post cannot publish photographs that don’t exist. No Israeli civilian had been killed by Gaza rocket fire since Oct. 29, 2011, more than a year earlier.

The prospect of a renewed assault weapons ban in the wake of the Connecticut school massacre has set of a round of buying, as thousands of Americans head to their local gun store to secure the popular AR-15 -- the model used by the school gunman -- before potential government prohibitions on their purchase. They are also buying the .223 ammunition used by the AR-15 and the type of high-capacity magazines covered under the last federal assault weapons ban, which Congress let expire without renewing.

The leader of the Turkish Democratic Party says 10,000 Taliban militants have been using a camp in Turkey to infiltrate into Syria via the two countries’ common border. - Namik Kemal Zeybek recently said that the Taliban militants were using a refugee camp in Turkey’s Hatay Province on the border with Syria as their base. The militants infiltrate into Syria and attack Syrian targets and then return to the base, he noted. Syria has been the scene of unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the turmoil. Damascus [correctly] says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside.

Former CIA director and top US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan David Petraeus granted two [Jewish] right-wing military analysts tied to defense contractors top security access to his Kabul headquarters, relying on their advice to run US-led wars, a report reveals. Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, “a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts,” left their jobs at major conservative and militaristic think tanks in Washington to serve the commander of US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan as top advisers for nearly a year without even getting paid for it, US-based daily The Washington Post reveals in a report on Wednesday. Given top-level security clearances, desks and email accounts in US military headquarters in Kabul, the Kagans “pored through classified intelligence reports, participated in senior-level strategy sessions and probed the assessments of field officers in order to advise Petraeus about how to fight the war differently,” the report says. The report, citing unnamed American military and civilian officials, further entails that the Kagans, who have ties with major US weapon producers and military contractors such as DynCorp International, CACI International and General Dynamics Corporation, used their privileges as senior advisers to Petraeus “to advocate substantive changes in the US war plan, including a harder-edged approach than some US officers advocated in combating the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction in eastern Afghanistan.” The pro-bono relationship, the daily adds, offered “valuable benefits” to the general and the two [Jewish] right-wing analysts.

Kelley B. Vlahos: The Two Faces of Kimberly Kagan - One look at her March 2007 performance on Washington Journal circa Surge I and it’s clear why Kagan has replaced the old neoconservative guard as a primary surrogate for the cause. (9/29/09)

Philip Giraldi: The Bombs-Away Election - "...Other Romney foreign policy advisers include Fred and Kimberly Kagan, Robert Kagan, Robert Joseph, and Elliot Cohen. Paul Ryan has been receiving foreign policy briefings from the Kagans and Elliot Abrams." (11/05/12)

Philip Giraldi: The Forever Wars of Frederick & Kimberly Kagan - That the Kagans are beating the drum for war and still more war is not surprising as that is how they make a living, but it is more disturbing when newspapers and media outlets that pretend to be reputable persist in providing a forum for their cheerleading. The Kagans [have] been leading neoconservative spokesmen since 9/11. Kimberly is currently president for the oddly named Institute for the Study of War while Fred, who claims to have been a co-creator of the surge policy that was applied in Iraq, is the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Fred’s brother Robert is at the Brookings Institution and has also been a foreign policy adviser to both John McCain and Mitt Romney. (12/6/12)

Philip Giraldi: Why Remember Iraq? - In an op-ed in the Washington Post on the impending U.S. departure from Iraq one year ago, neocons Kimberly and Fred Kagan delusionally entertained five “American core interests” in the region. They were: that Iraq should continue to be one unified state; that there should be no al-Qaeda on its soil; that Baghdad abides by its international responsibilities; that Iraq should contain Iran; and that the al-Maliki government should accept U.S. “commitment” to the region. As the Kagans are first and foremost apologists for Israel, it should be observed that Iraq’s “international responsibilities” would be understood as referring to the expectation that Baghdad not be hostile to Tel Aviv. (12/13/12)

The Canadian government has reportedly ordered the scientific journals of the country not to publish articles authored by Iranian researchers and scientists. - Iranian academics, who had primarily received an acceptance from the journals, have received new messages that notified them of the journals' decision not to publish their work due to recent policies adopted by the Canadian government. In a recent move, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research refused to publish an article by an Iranian assistant professor despite the earlier acceptance of the article. The journal argued that it "will not be permitted to publish" the article as previously stated, citing the political and non-academic reasons. It said that Ottawa had closed down its mission in Tehran for what it called the “civil rights abuse of the citizens of Iran” and “the threat to the security of Canadian personnel and Israel.”

More than six decades since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls — and thousands of years after they were written — Israel on Tuesday put 5,000 images of the ancient biblical artifacts online in a partnership with Google. The digital library contains the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the second listing of the Ten Commandments, and a portion of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, dated to the first century B.C.