Meanwhile, Mohammed Morsi faced fissures from within after a stunning surge of street rage reminiscent of Egypt's Arab Spring revolution in 2011 that cleared the way for Morsi's long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood to win the first open elections in decades.

Three government spokesmen were the latest to quit as part of high-level defections that underscored his increasing isolation and fallout from the ultimatum from Egypt's powerful armed forces to either find a political solution by Wednesday or the generals would seek their own way to end the political chaos.

The Cabinet, led by the Morsi-backed Prime Minister Hesham Qandil, was scheduled to meet later Tuesday. But the defense and interior ministers were expected to boycott in a sign of support for the military's warnings.

The police, which are under control of the Interior Ministry, have stood on the sidelines of the protests, refusing even to protect the offices of the Muslim Brotherhood that have been attacked and ransacked.

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The statement was read and broadcast live on state television.

Sixteen Egyptians were killed and hundreds more injured after a day of mass protests nationwide Sunday gave way to violent clashes outside the ruling Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo overnight.

Millions took to the streets in Cairo and other cities — in demonstrations that dwarfed the protests of the uprising two years ago — to call for President Mohamed Morsi, a former Brotherhood leader, to step down after a turbulent year in power.

As night fell, demonstrators besieged the Islamist movement’s headquarters — throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, to which Brotherhood members holed up inside responded with gunfire, witnesses said. Eight peopled were killed in ensuing clashes, and protesters eventually ransacked and looted the office, according to the health ministry.

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Even before television, in the 1950s and 1960s there had been a dramatic increase in radio usage across the Arab world, especially after the rise of transistor and short-wave radios and their availability to the masses. The most striking and influential example was Sawt al-Arab Radio (“Voice of the Arabs”), sponsored by Egypt to spread Nasser’s Pan-Arabist message in the 1950s and 1960s. This station was so popular across the region that it presented real challenges to Nasser’s political opponents among the conservative Arab rulers in places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who attempted to jam the broadcasts.

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However, the officials said the administration has not determined how it will respond.

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Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, has a special tie to Bahari's story: Bahari landed in Iranian jail a week after his participation in a 2009 "Daily Show" segment on Iran.

Stewart replayed "Minarets of Menace," a segment for which "we actually tried to get a correspondent into Iran because they had been nicknamed the axis of evil," Stewart explained. "We wanted to see who these evil people were," he said in jest. In the segment, correspondent Jason Jones interviewed Bahari about life in Iran:

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International weapons sales have proved to be a thriving global business in economically tough times.  According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), such sales reached an impressive $85 billion in 2011, nearly double the figure for 2010.  This surge in military spending reflected efforts by major Middle Eastern powers to bolster their armories with modern jets, tanks, and missiles -- a process constantly encouraged by the leading arms manufacturing countries (especially the U.S. and Russia) as it helps keep domestic production lines humming.  However, this familiar if always troubling pattern may soon be overshadowed by a more ominous development in the global arms trade: the revival of far more targeted Cold War-style weapons sales aimed at undermining rivals and destabilizing regional power balances.  The result, inevitably, will be a more precarious world.

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Since November, the United States has replaced Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest producer of crude oil. It had already overtaken Russia as the leading producer of natural gas.

The emergence of the United States as a global energy superpower has a profound strategic impact that is raising expectations and concerns among America's allies.

“This is something that is going to change not only the energy market in the world, but everything else,” said Jeppe Kofod, a Danish lawmaker who is drafting a report on the oil and gas revolution for NATO's Parliamentary Assembly.

“It has huge political and geo-strategic implications,” Kofod told a recent meeting of legislators from the 28 alliance nations.

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Original post: Prospects for peace talks over the Syrian civil war looked grim Tuesday, as the U.S. and E.U. butted heads with Russia over sending arms to opposing sides in the bloody conflict. The U.S. has praised Europe's decision to ease an arms embargo against Syrian rebels, although major European forces Britain and France have not gone so far as to arm Syrian rebels. As the Guardian noted:

British officials said the lifting of the embargo had a political purpose, increasing pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters, Russia and Iran, to make concessions at Geneva, and most importantly to agree not to play a role in a transitional Syrian government. If that fails, the officials said western arms supplies would strengthen moderate elements in the opposition who are currently outgunned and outfinanced by jihadist groups.

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BEIRUT (AP) — The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah warned Saturday that the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime would give rise to extremists and plunge the Middle East into a "dark period," and vowed his Shiite militant group will not stand idly by while its chief ally in Damascus is under attack.

In a televised address, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic extremists who pose a danger to Lebanon, and pledged that his group will not allow Syrian militants to control areas that border Lebanon.

Nasrallah's comments marked the first time he has publically confirmed his men were fighting in Syria, and were his first remarks since Hezbollah fighters have become deeply involved in the battle for the strategic Syrian town of Qusair near the Lebanese frontier.

Hezbollah has come under harsh criticism at home and abroad for sending fighters to Syria to fight along Assad's forces. In his speech, Nasrallah sought to defend the group's deepening involvement, and frame its fight next door as part of a broader battle against Israel.

He also portrayed the fight in Syria as an "existential war" for anti-Israel groups including Hezbollah.

"Syria is the back of the resistance, and the resistance cannot stand, arms folded while its back is broken," Nasrallah told thousands of supporters from a secret location though a video link.

"If Syria falls into the hand of America, Israel and takfiris, the resistance (Hezbollah) will be besieged and Israel will enter Lebanon and impose its will," Nasrallah said. Takfiri Islamists refers to an ideology that urges Sunni Muslims to kill anyone they consider an infidel.

"If Syria falls in the hands of America, Israel and the takfiris, the people of our region will go into a dark period," he said in a speech to mark the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. "If Syria falls, Palestine will be lost."

Syria, along with Iran, has been the main backer of Hezbollah and much of the group's arsenal consisting tens of thousands of rockets is believed to have come through or from Syria.

More than 70,000 people have been killed and several million displaced since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011 and escalated into a civil war. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny there is an uprising in Syria, portraying the war as a foreign-backed conspiracy driven by Israel, the U.S. and its gulf Arab allies.

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"We can agree to give them the bases – them staying on after 2014 is for the good of Afghanistan," Karzai said in a speech at Kabul University. "The condition is that they bring peace and security and take action quickly … on the basic strengthening of Afghanistan, helping the economy of Afghanistan."

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Revolutions tend to occur in waves, triggered by the aftermath of wars, like the world wars, or by revolutions in leading countries, like the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the last generation, there have been four regional waves of revolution. With the end of the Cold War, communist regimes were swept from power from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, surviving only in a few countries including China, North Korea and Cuba. Unable to justify themselves with the pretense of fighting communism, military dictatorships were swept away in Latin America. Then the Arab Spring triggered a wave of populist if not necessarily democratic revolutions against autocracies in North Africa and the Middle East.

Are we seeing a new wave of revolutionary politics in the heartland of the industrial West? Although governments are not being violently overthrown in Europe, political systems are being destabilized by the rise of anti-system movements opposed to the major establishment parties. In Greece, the leftist Syriza party and the far-right Golden Dawn have sapped power from the political center. The most recent Italian election was dominated by anti-system candidates, including Silvio Berlusconi and the comedian Beppe Grillo.

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U.S. and Russia meet in an attempt at framing a political solution:

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Syria and its patron Iran hinted at possible retribution, though the rhetoric in official statements appeared relatively muted.

Despite new concerns about a regional war, Israeli officials signaled they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon's Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a monthlong war in 2006.

Since carrying out a lone airstrike in January that reportedly destroyed a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles headed to Hezbollah, Israel had largely stayed on the sidelines. That changed over the weekend with a pair of airstrikes, including an attack near a sprawling military complex close to the Syrian capital of Damascus early Sunday that set off a series of powerful explosions.

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The New York Times noted that "both his tone and his body language indicated that the assessment process would be careful and deliberate." For some months the Obama administration has called the use of chemical weapons by Assad's regime a "red line" that would prompt military intervention. However, claims that chemical weapons have been used have left Western governments equivocating over action. As the Guardian noted, "On Thursday the British defense secretary, Philip Hammond, said the west would have to wait for any further chemical attacks to be sure of Syrian government involvement, because previously gathered evidence had begun to degrade and could not prove a link."

Via the New York Times:

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It does not diminish the horror of mass casualty attacks on civilians, in this and other countries, to point out that today’s terrorist incidents provide a counterpoint to a declining arc of political violence worldwide. Both violence among states and violence within states have diminished dramatically in the last few generations.

If we look at battle deaths in the last century, the spurts in the Cold War, associated with the Korean, Indochina and Soviet-Afghan wars, were dwarfed by the huge spikes of slaughter associated with the world wars. And with the end of the Cold War came a steep decline in political violence worldwide — mainly because the two sides no longer kept local conflicts going by arming and supplying opposing sides from Latin America to Africa to Asia and the Middle East.

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The Syrian government claims that the UN has attempted to widen the remit of its mission, which it says was originally intended to investigate an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan al-Assal in Aleppo last month. It says the UN now wants "additional investigations which might allow the UN mission to spread all over the Syrian territories, and this contradicts the Syrian request from the UN and indicates to the presence of hidden intentions at the states which have sought to add those investigations as this constitutes a violation of the Syrian sovereignty".

Syrian state media reported that the government would not allow such "manoeuvres" but would still allow the mission to visit Khan al-Assal in keeping with its original intention

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The Times reported that the airlifts, which began in early 2012, now include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, as well as at other Jordanian and Turkish airports. An estimated 3,500 tons of equipment have been delivered through these flights. The Times noted too that U.S. intelligence officers check up on rebel groups and chiefs to determine who should receive the military aid and that Turkey oversaw much of the program.

Via the Times:

[E]ven as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.

The inclusion of the term "mostly" in the above paragraph is interesting and raises questions about the small role the CIA is playing outside of consultations.

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