Al Jazeera's latest leak of hundreds of secret Palestinian negotiating papers is providing the kind of fly-on-the-wall insights to Mideast peace talks that usually only emerge many years later in the autobiographies of politicians and diplomats.

Though some of the initial coverage and spin by Al Jazeera and other organizations has been inaccurate or out of context, the documents themselves offer a treasure trove of detailed information about Palestinians' internal strategy and tactics. Most of the documents were produced by the Palestinian Authority's own attorneys, advisors and negotiators and include transcripts of private strategy sessions and internal talking points. It's a bonanza for Israel, which can get a peek into the Palestinian thought process as recently as last year.

One December 2009 document discusses "Palestinian Messaging and Implementation." Another lays out the legal risks of a premature declaration of statehood. An internal summary of where peace talks last broke down reveals that Palestinians were prepared in 2008 to limit the number of returning refugees to 15,000 a year for 10 years, or 150,000.

If there’s a lesson from Sunday's leak of alleged meeting minutes from 2008 Mideast peace talks involving Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. officials and from the previous WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, perhaps it's this: Governments needn't be so afraid of having their private business aired in public.

After the initial U.S. embarrassment from the WikiLeaks disclosures, many came to believe that the cables actually showed U.S. diplomats to be rather astute and well-informed. In the same way, Palestinians so far don't really seem to have anything to be ashamed of in the leaks from the 2008 talks. Despite the spin by Al-Jazeera and critics of the Palestinian Authority, the documents released don't show Palestinian negotiators giving away the store.

To the contrary, they're depicted as taking a surprisingly hard-line stance against giving up massive West Bank settlements such as Maale Adumim, Givat Zeev, Har Homa and Ariel, which most experts have long presumed would be retained by Israel with little fuss or cost.

Activists in Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and even Albania  took to the streets this weekend demanding democratic reforms in their countries.  

Some expressed explicit support for the Tunisian people, calling for similar uprisings in their own countries. Others were more reserved. Jordanians directed their anger at the prime minister rather than trying to oust the royal family.

The popular demonstrations drew comparisons to the Tunisian protest movement that has captivated the world. But opinions remain divided on whether these events constitute a real threat to the ruling powers in those countries.

"The regime will always look strong until the day it collapses," Nadim Shehadi, from the London-based think tank Chatham House, told Babylon & Beyond. "It cannot look weak, because the minute it looks weak it is dead already."

Like the rest of the region, Israel is keeping a keen eye on developments in Tunisia even as it  waits to see what tomorrow (or the next day) brings in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to convene an intelligence assessment meeting to study the situation, Israel Radio reported, but has already drawn one conclusion.

"The region in which we live is unstable ... we see this at several points throughout the Middle East," Netanyahu said at Sunday's weekly Cabinet meeting. And the one clear lesson arising from the surrounding situation is that "we need to lay the foundations of security in any agreement we make," he said. Peace can unravel, regime and other changes can occur; therefore, the government's policy is to "bind peace and security together," Netanyahu said.

The peace and security chicken-and-egg conundrum presents a stumbling block that is more than just a procedural dispute of what gets discussed first. Security is the key to keeping the peace, Netanyahu said last week in his annual meeting with the foreign media.

"This may not be obvious to some of you, because you hear all the time a contrary statement that says 'well, what will keep the peace is the peace,'" said Netanyahu. The formal conclusion of peace doesn't guarantee the continuation of peace, but the security arrangements will "buttress" it and "protect us in case peace unravels ... or Iran tries to walk in," the prime minister said. 

The grim theater of the Sakineh Ashtiani case gets stranger by the day as rumors of a commuted sentence coincided with a press conference at which Ashtiani lashed out at the Western press and her own lawyers for attempting to "politicize" her case.

Ashtiani's position is precarious. Not only does she face death by hanging for adultery and conspiracy to commit murder, but her son is also now in the hands of the judiciary after he was arrested for giving an interview to two unaccredited German journalists.

"I have come in front of the cameras at my own will to talk to the world," Ashtiani reportedly said during Saturday's press conference, which was organized by Iranian judiciary officials in Tabriz, where Ashtiani is being held.

"I am willing to talk because many people exploited (the case) and said I have been tortured, which is a lie," she added. "Leave my case alone. Why do you disgrace me?"

Huge gas fields discovered recently under the Mediterranean seabed have raised high hopes in Israel, a small, high-consumption country seeking alternative energy resources and a greater degree of
  independence from imports.

In a different geopolitical reality, the discovery could benefit the whole region — if it was on speaking terms. Everyone wants to tap natural resources — but this one taps into standing regional squabbles.

Israel and Lebanon, for example. The deposits extend into areas controlled by Lebanon, and it has accused Israel of moving in on its natural resources. Not so, says  Israel, which maintains that the fields lie between its territory and Cyprus.  Israel's minister of national infrastructures, Uzi Landau, even said Israel would "not hesitate to use force" to protect the fields and uphold international maritime law.

A group of political dissidents charged with plotting against the government of Bahrain are stonewalling the prosecution by refusing to cooperate with state-appointed lawyers after their own legal team withdrew in protest over the authorities' refusal to investigate torture claims.

On Thursday, the trial for 25 dissidents accused of terrorism was adjourned until Jan. 6 after the state-appointed lawyers told the court they could not do their job without their clients' cooperation, according to organizations following the case. Local media has been barred from covering the trial.

The trial has become the most visible symbol of the Sunni monarchy's crackdown against the largely Shiite opposition, which has sparked riots and led to the arrest of hundreds of people since it was launched in the months leading up to the October parliamentary elections.

Bahrain, a close ally of the United States and host to the Navy's Fifth Fleet, has come under heavy criticism from local and international human rights organizations, which have accused authorities of torturing the defendants on the pretext of trumped-up charges.

Lebanon is bristling with nervous tension as it awaits the announcement that could spark a new round of civil strife or even another war with Israel, but disaster may not be as imminent as many fear.

It has been nearly two weeks since a prosecutor's office told reporters in the Hague, Netherlands, that the draft indictment in the investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri would be handed over to the pretrial judge, Daniel Franson, "very very soon." Hezbollah members are expected to be accused of complicity in that bombing, which killed 21 others as well.

The nation has braced for a confrontation between the government and the Shiite militia, which has dismissed the court as a politically charged sham and vowed to fight the charges and prevent any of its members from being taken into custody.

But experts estimate it will take another six to 10 weeks for the judge to review the merits of the case, and even if he confirms the indictment, he can rule to keep its contents confidential. That means the names of suspects -- unless somebody inside the court leaks the names to the media -- probably won't come out before mid-February, if they are made public at all.

 "At the moment that the prosecutor submits the indictments to the pretrial judge, there will be a substantive shift in the focus of the work of the [special tribunal for Lebanon], with the judicial taking the lead," Crispin Thorold, chief public affairs officer for the tribunal, told Babylon & Beyond.

Nearly 200 mostly military personnel accused of plotting to bomb mosques and assassinate journalists as part of a plan to overthrow the government went on trial Thursday in Istanbul in a milestone case many observers have characterized as a key step in the process to demilitarize Turkish politics.

The alleged coup, dubbed the "sledgehammer" plot, was reportedly planned for 2003 but only came to light in February of this year when the Turkish newspaper Taraf obtained documents it claimed laid out a detailed plan for overthrowing the government.

According to the Taraf report, the alleged coup-plotters intended to sow unrest by blowing up two Istanbul mosques and provoking the Greek military into shooting down a Turkish fighter jet. They are also accused of planning to assassinate 19 journalists, arrest 36 others and “make use of” 137 others.

 "The relationship [between the civilian and military branches of government] is normalizing, and Turkey is in a process of transition from a tutelary democracy controlled by the military to a normal democracy," Sahin Alpay, a senior lecturer in political science at Bahcesehir University, told Babylon and Beyond. "There is public support also in the country for normal role for the military ... as a normal, professional army."

A YouTube video showing a Sudanese woman pleading and crying as she was flogged in public by police officers has prompted an inquiry by the country's judicial authorities.

"An investigation was started immediately into the lashing of a woman as seen on a website, and the implementation of sanctions that go against what is outlined in the criminal code," the judiciary said in a statement published in a number of Sudanese state-run newspapers.

The video, which has been circulated around the Internet over the last two days, shows a woman in a long black dress and a headscarf being whipped by two blue-uniformed police officers in what appears to be a government yard; a Sudanese flag stands nearby.

One of the officers is heard saying that the unidentified woman's sentence is "50 ... lashes," while others laugh in front of the camera when they realize that the incident is being filmed.

American diplomats appeared pleased with Saudi Arabia's new strategy to control editors and journalists, according to a secret State Department dispatch disclosed this week by the watchdog site WikiLeaks that offered a rare peak into the shadowy mechanisms of censorship in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

The May 11, 2009, diplomatic cable titled "Ideological and Ownership Trends in the Saudi Media" noted approvingly that the government seemed to be opening up to a certain amount of foreign cultural influence in the form of Hollywood movies and television shows while cracking down on Islamist messages deemed too extreme even for the state-approved brand of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam.

But despite the author of the report's apparent hope that shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Late Night With David Letterman" would serve as an antidote to some of the more conservative trends in the country, the document makes clear that the government has no intention of ceding control over the message, just tweaking it a little.

Saudi regulatory bodies, which are beholden to the royal family, have evolved to thrive in a dynamic new media environment, switching to a more subtly coercive and decentralized approach. "Instead of being fired or seeing their publications shut down, editors now are fined [$10,600] out of their own salaries for each objectionable piece that appears in their newspaper," the cable read. "Journalists, too, are held to account."

The massive aerial offensive is over. The efforts of dozens of assorted aircraft that flew hundreds of sorties in three days were crowned by two round trips of the gigantic Evergreen supertanker that finished off the job, the peak of a splendid air show. The commander of Israel's air force thanked the many foreign teams that took part in the huge effort, and the skies over Haifa are suddenly silent. 

After days of flames that gripped the Israel's Carmel woodlands and mesmerized the nation, came the magic word everyone was waiting for. "Control has been attained," announced Fire Chief Shimon Romach Sunday evening, and police officials allowed all but one evacuated community to return to their homes.

Still, "control doesn't mean it's over," cautioned firefighter Boaz Rakia, who expects renewed outbursts of flames in numerous hot spots. Firefighters will remain widely deployed, he said.

Earlier in the morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held the weekly cabinet meeting in Tirat HaCarmel, one of the affected communities where thousands of people had been evacuated. "We must help the evacuees, rebuild their homes and rehabilitate the infrastructures and we must do so as quickly as possible," he said.

Netanyahu instructed ministers to expedite damage assessment and compensation plans and allocate an immediate $17 million. He also asked to see a plan for rehabilitation of the Carmel landscape and wildlife within 21 days.

Initial figures estimate the overall damage caused by the fire at $450 million, according to the Maariv daily, which also said that had the money been spent in the right place at the right time, these costs could have been avoided.