By Ellen Barry and Steven Erlanger, New York Times, Dec. 13/14, 2012

MOSCOW — The outlook for Syria’s embattled president darkened considerably on Thursday when his most powerful foreign ally, Russia, acknowledged that he was losing the struggle against an increasingly coordinated insurgency and for the first time said it was making contingency plans to evacuate its citizens from the country, the Kremlin’s last beachhead in the Middle East [....]

The Russian assessment, made publicly by a top Foreign Ministry official in Moscow, appeared to signal a major turn in the diplomacy of the nearly two-year-old conflict and presented new evidence that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing politically as well as militarily.

The assessment suggested that Russia no longer viewed Mr. Assad’s involvement in a negotiated solution as a viable alternative. It also appeared to reflect a new recognition in Moscow that Mr. Assad and his minority Alawite government, long a Russian client, could not survive in the face of a well-armed opposition financed by Arab and Western countries seeking his ouster [....]

Also see:

Syria conflict: Russia denies ditching Assad -
By Matthew Weaver, The Guardian's Middle East Live, 14 Dec., 2012

Russian foreign ministry moves to play down admission that Syrian opposition could topple Bashar al-Assad

And:

Did Russia Just Throw Assad Under the Bus?
By Andrew S Weiss, Op Ed, ForeignPolicy.com, Dec. 13, 2012

Not really. Watch what the Kremlin does, not what it says.
 

A flurry of late legislation is typical in lame duck, but some long-time Lansing observers said the Thursday-Friday session was extraordinary.

Measures sent to Snyder include:

• A phased-out elimination of the personal property tax

• Greater restrictions on abortion, including licensing of abortion facilities.

• The final bills needed to create a Regional Transportation Authority for southeast Michigan.

• An authority intended to improve streetlights in the city of Detroit.

• Legislation to assist Mike Ilitch in his plans for a new arena and entertainment district in downtown Detroit.

• Bills that make it tougher to recall state lawmakers.

• A requirement — already vetoed once by Snyder — that voters declare in writing they are U.S. citizens.

• A replacement emergency manager law, less than two months after voters rejected the former law, Public Act 4 of 2011.

• Privatization of a prison in Baldwin.

• Easing restrictions on where guns can be carried.

• Changes to the state’s medical marijuana laws.

By Nelson D Schwartz and Jonathan Weisman, New York Times, Dec. 11/12, 2012

A broad swath of the nation’s leading chief executives dropped its opposition to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans on Tuesday, while the White House quietly pressed Wall Street titans for their support as well.

Before Tuesday’s about-face, the Business Roundtable had insisted that the White House extend Bush-era tax cuts to taxpayers of all income brackets, but the executives’ resistance crumbled as pressure builds to find a compromise for the fiscal impasse in Washington before the end of the year.

“We recognize that part of the solution has to be tax increases,” David M. Cote, chief executive of Honeywell, said on a conference call with reporters. “That’s the only thing that allows a reasonable compromise to be reached.”

Even as the Fortune 500 leaders announced their shift, the White House continued to work behind the scenes to woo some of Wall Street’s most powerful financiers — a group that had largely abandoned President Obama in his bid for a second term after supporting him in 2008.

After seeking out corporate leaders from industrial companies last month, the White House has intensified outreach to Wall Street in December [....]

By Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Dec. 17, 2012 issue

Here is something you probably didn’t know about France: its President has the power to abolish homework. In a recent speech at the Sorbonne, François Hollande announced his intention to do this for all primary- and middle-school students. He wants to reform French education in other ways, too: by shortening the school day and diverting more resources to schools in disadvantaged areas. France ranked twenty-fifth in a new evaluation of educational systems by the Economist Intelligence Unit (part of the company that publishes The Economist). To give you an idea how bad that is, the United States, whose citizens are accustomed to being told how poorly educated they are, ranked seventeenth.

By Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 10, 2012

The U.S. State  Department designated the Jabhat al-Nusra militia fighting Bashar al-Ashad's government in Syria a foreign terrorist organization today.

The speed with which the US government moved to designate a fairly new group that has never attacked US interests and is engaged in fighting a regime that successive administrations have demonized is evidence of the strange bedfellows and overlapping agendas that make the Syrian civil war so explosive.

The State Department says Jabhat al-Nusra (or the "Nusra Front") is essentially a wing of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the jihadi group that flourished in Anbar Province after the US invaded to topple the Baathist regime of secular dictator Saddam Hussein [....]

For the US, the situation is more complicated still. The Obama administration appears eager for Assad to fall, but is also afraid of what might replace him, not least because of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile [....]

Also see:

US declares Jabhat al-Nusra, a group in Syria with alleged al-Qaida links, as terrorist body
Associated Press, Dec. 10, 2012

[....] The move hasn’t been announced officially but was included in the Federal Register on Monday. The department said the group was part of al-Qaida in Iraq [....]

And:

Syrian sectarian fighting spills into Lebanon
By Carol Morello, Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2012

[....] In recent days, scattered reports have suggested that jihadi groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra are gaining ground in places where support for the Free Syrian Army is wearing thin [....]

Britain, France and the US have agreed that none of their countries would have “boots on the ground” to help the rebels. The training camps can be set up in Turkey. However, the use of air and maritime force would, in itself, be highly controversial and likely to lead to charges that, as in Libya, the West is carrying out regime change by force.

Furthermore, any such military action will have to take place without United Nations authorisation, with Russia and China highly unlikely to back a resolution after their experience over Libya where they agreed to a “no-fly zone” only to see it turn into a Nato bombing campaign lasting months.

The plan will also draw accusations that the decision to station Nato Patriot missile defence systems at the Syrian border, at the request of Turkey, was, in reality, to camouflage intervention. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Foreign Secretary William Hague and the alliance’s Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had all insisted at a meeting in Brussels last week that the deployment was a purely defensive measure. British defence sources maintain that Ankara would have made the request even without the plan to aid the rebels. Neither Germany nor the Netherlands, which will be deploying the Patriots, have been part of the secret Syria talks.

There has been a steady flow of briefings from the US that the Damascus regime is readying its stock of chemical weapons. Ms Clinton stated that a desperate Assad may resort to such an attack, while President Obama has warned of a “red line” on chemical weapons, saying the use of them will not be tolerated.

So what effects do these laws have? There’s a dizzying amount of research on the subject. But a few broad conclusions can be drawn: Right-to-work laws weaken labor unions. The laws tilt the balance of power in states so that workers reap fewer of the gains from growth. And it’s hard to find solid evidence that right-to-work laws help (or hurt) a state’s economy. More broadly, it’s yet another sign of the decline of labor across the entire country.

By Patrick McGeehan, New York Times, Dec. 9/10, 2012

[....] There is no official tally, but local leaders estimated that a few thousand small businesses had been shuttered or were operating at less than full strength since the storm and that as many as 10,000 jobs had been lost, at least temporarily. About 3,000 apartments in Lower Manhattan remain uninhabitable, according to Daniel L. Squadron, a Democratic state senator who represents the area.

“We’re really in disaster recovery mode down here, there’s no question about that,” said Ro Sheffe, who will lead a disaster-relief task force for small businesses in Community Board 1.

Mr. Sheffe, who has lived near the World Trade Center for 19 years, said he feared the financial district would fall into a slump, as it did after the terrorist attacks 11 years ago. “The nightmare I’m fighting day and night is this vision of the downtown area filled with empty shops and ‘for rent’ signs,” Mr. Sheffe said. “That’s something that we saw after September 11 and I never want to see it again.” 

Among the obstacles to recovery is the slow restoration of phone and Internet service, business owners and city officials said. Many merchants have been able to accept only cash payments for more than a month, an inconvenience they are loath to impose on the customers trickling in.  [....]

Well, it is official.  I thought Crist would wait until the Jim Greer trials was over to switch.  He probably will not make an announcement to run until after the trial.  Greer's lawyer has hinted that their client will spill the beans on corruption in the Florida Republican Party affairs.  His trial starts in January for money laundering while he was the head of the Florida Republican Party.  There could also be some fall out for Rubio over his use of the party's credit card. 

Don't forget to take a look at the picture of Crist's wife.  

The crucial point is this: as tens of millions of U.S. voters were choosing Barack Obama in 2008, in part because he was promising to end the war in Iraq, a powerful cross-section of Washington elites was drafting an aggressive blueprint for a future U.S. strategy in the region that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia and that the Pentagon was then still calling the “arc of instability.” And the key plank in this strategy was a program to create the conditions for a military strike against Iran.

By Jonathan Ansfield, New York Times, Dec. 4/5, 2012

BEIJING — “Thank you. I’m well. Don’t worry,” read the post on a Chinese social networking site. The brief comment, published in June, appeared to come from Ling Gu, the 23-year-old son of a high-powered aide to China's president, and it helped quash reports that he had been killed in a Ferrari crash after a night of partying.

It only later emerged that the message was a sham, posted by someone under Mr. Ling’s alias — almost three months after his death.

The ploy was one of many in a tangled effort to suppress news of the crash that killed Mr. Ling and critically injured two young female passengers, one of whom later died. The outlines of the affair surfaced months ago, but it is now becoming clearer that the crash and the botched cover-up had more momentous consequences, altering the course of the Chinese Communist Party’s once-in-a-decade leadership succession last month [.....]