By choosing to back Syria President Bashar al-Assad and block a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for a transfer of power in his country, Russia seems to be placing itself as a counterbalance to NATO interests in the region.

Rim Turkmani, a member of the external Syrian opposition and an astrophysicist at the Imperial College of London, goes so far as to describe the Syrian crisis as a “proxy war” between Russia and the West. Since the beginning of the country’s uprising in March, Moscow has supported the Syrian government with more than just rhetoric, reportedly concluding a $550m arms sales to Damascus.

In addition to using the arms sales to thumb its nose at talk of military intervention against Syria, Russia may also be looking to make up for lost revenue after sanctions prompted it to cancel missile sales to Iran.

Despite the cancellation, Russia has maintained its ties with Iran, a Syrian ally, by criticising the European Union embargo on Iranian oil. All of this comes at a delicate time for Russia, itself having recently faced protests on the streets of Moscow over allegations of fraud in December’s parliamentary elections. More [Al Jazeera/Photo:EPA]

“We’ve convicted people with thinner files and less evidence,” a judge told me on my first morning in Iranian detention.

Pointing to a thick folder, he continued, “You might as well just tell us which American agency you work for.”

Ending up in Evin is every Iranian’s nightmare. It’s not the only prison and detention center in Iran, but it’s probably the most infamous.

Horror stories pouring out of Iranian prisons are in no shortage, and cases of torture and rape have been reported by opposition and foreign media, as well as rights groups from the Shah’s time and since.

I was in Evin in May after the Syrians (who didn’t care for an Al Jazeera journalist reporting the events there) alleged that that I was a spy and forced me onto a flight to Iran. But not before locking me up and interrogating me for a few days in one of their own hell holes — a secret detention center not far from the Damascus airport.

Those three days in Syria were all blood, screams and cruelty meted out casually to Syrians, with me as a witness. More [PBS/Tehran Bureau]

Relations between France and Turkey have reached breaking point after the French senate approved a bill that outlaws denying that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 constituted genocide.

Turkey, which sees such allegations as a threat to its national honour, has already suspended military, economic and political ties with France.

It has also said it will bring sanctions against France over the law, although the nature of those sanctions remains unclear.

However, according the the AFP news agency, trade between the two countries was worth $15.5bn in 2010, with a significant number of French firms operating in Turkey, which also has a number of defence contracts with France, including a purchase order for air defence missiles.

A report submitted to the French parliament indicates France sold more than $260m in weapons to Turkey between 2006 and 2010,

Helen Drake, senior lecturer in French and European Studies at UK’s Loughborough University, said: “The response [from Turkey] will be rhetorically robust, but diplomacy behind the scenes will continue as usual.”

She added that while Turkey is an important ally to France, it is neither a top trading partner nor “a friend as such, so relations will remain tense”. More [Al Jazeera/Photo:AFP]

With tighter sanctions, talk of Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and the assassination of yet another nuclear scientist in Iran, tensions are building on multiple fronts as a coalition of countries tries to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, told the IRNA news agency on Thursday that UN nuclear inspectors would be welcome in the country and that issues with the nuclear programme can be resolved via negotiations. The path to diplomacy is, however, obscured by decades of ill will between Iran and the West.

The problems go as far back as the US and UK-led coup that unseated Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 and reinstated the unpopular Shah. But even if historical baggage could be left in the past, today’s issues alone are enough to pose major diplomatic stumbling blocks.

The Iranian government insists that its nuclear programme is peaceful and not aimed at weaponisation, while the US and some EU countries suspect otherwise. The West has upped the ante with harsh sanctions and embargoes since a November report from the International Atomic Energy Agency warned that it was “increasingly concerned” about the nature of Iran’s nuclear programme.

As if to emphasise a point, Iran followed up talk of blocking the Strait of Hormuz with ten days of military exercises in the Gulf and an announcement that it has begun nuclear enrichment at one of its facilities.

“The Iranian threat has been blown out of proportion not because of Iran’s impressive military might, but because people are unclear whether the Iranian regime is led by rational actors,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an associate in the Middle East Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. More [Al Jazeera]

Nabeel Rajab, the head of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, has been beaten and briefly detained after a march he took part in in the capital Manama was dispersed.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from his home soon after leaving the Sulaimaniya hospital, Rajab said that he was attacked after riot police charged the crowd he and other protesters hid in nearby homes. They waited for things to calm down before leaving to return to their own homes.

“Maybe 25, 30 minutes later, I went out toward my car and they found me and attacked me,” said Rajab.

Multiple posts on the microblogging site featured a video of Nabeel Rajab speaking to riot police on Friday night, shortly before he was beaten and taken away.

His colleague at the rights centre, S Yousif Almuhfada, posted that Rajab had been released after being questioned by the authorities. For several hours, social media was flooded with concern and rumours about Rajab’s fate.

“Five, six, seven people, I don’t know how many people. They were attacking from everywhere. When a police officer came, I heard them say, ‘We found Nabeel lying down,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m not lying down – you’re beating me,’” Rajab said. More [Al Jazeera]

Nine months after the worst earthquake and tsunami to ever hit Japan, the rubble is still being cleared, but the issue of nuclear contamination will take decades to deal with.

Japan’s government on Wednesday announced that decommissioning the damaged and leaking Fukushima Daiichi plant will take three or four decades – that is just for the plant alone and not the surrounding areas, composed mostly of farmland.

“The period of time it would take to decommission the plant should not have a direct bearing on when the evacuees will be allowed to return home,” Trade Minister Yukio Edano told reporters.

The Daiichi plant in Fukushima, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), was badly damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

With its cooling system destroyed, the plant has been leaking radioactive substances into the sea as well as the soil and air. Experts have said that the contamination from Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl.

The government last week announced that reactors are in a state of cold shutdown, indicating that it was preparing to eventually decommission the plant.

According to the cleanup plan announced on Wednesday, crews will begin removing spent fuel from the plant before 2014. The timeline for removing melted fuel debris from the reactors is a decade, with a full decommissioning taking as long as 40 years.

While four decades seems like a long time, some think that estimate is unrealistically short, given the scale of the nuclear disaster at the plant.

“The forty year time frame seems very challenging,” said said MV Ramana, a researcher at Princeton University specialising in the nuclear industry and climate change.

While he said that there have been cases in the US where nuclear reactors have been decommissioned within that time frame, Ramana added that none of those reactors went through an accident on the scale of Fukushima – ranked level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale with fuel meltdown and contamination of the surrounding area. More [Al Jazeera/Photo:D.Parvaz]

Longstanding ties between Cairo and Washington became strained in January when revolution broke out in Egypt, inspired by revolts in the region now known collectively as the Arab Spring.

Speaking to a news programme in January, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, declared: “Real stability only comes from the kind of democratic participation that allows people to feel that they are being heard”, and called for “real democracy” in Egypt.

Yet, two years earlier, Hillary Clinton had referred to Mubarak and his wife as ”friends” of her family, which includes her husband Bill Clinton, the US president from 1993 to 2001.

If it was awkward for the US to publicly denounce former friends, it may prove an even greater diplomatic challenge to form new ties with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which was officially banned during Mubarak’s rule.

Even so, experts believe the US needs all the friends it can find in the region. Washington currently has no diplomatic relations with Iran, its slowly-improving rapport with Syria has been shattered, and Lebanon, where Hezbollah holds sway, is hardly an ally. More [Al Jazeera/EPA]

While it’s known that the US has used indefinite detention of suspects in its “war on terror”, Congress has voted to make the same treatment legal for US citizens apprehended within the US.

The House of Representatives passed the 2012 National Defence Authorisation Act (or NDAA) on Wednesday and Senate approved it (86 to 13) on Thursday. But the Senate had already passed one version of the bill on December 1, with 93 votes in favour of and seven against – a remarkable margin.

The NDAA, which includes the 2012 $662bn military budget and more. But civil liberties advocates are concerned over a section in the legislation that deals with the detention  of civilians by the military.

A person can be detained “under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities”, the bill states. The hostility in question here is the “war on terror”, and at the moment, it seems to have no endProvisions in the bill codify an approach that allows for endless detention of US citizens and non-citizens picked up anywhere in the world. They also gives the US military the option to detain US citizens suspected of participating or aiding in terrorist activities without a trial, indefinitely. More [Al Jazeera]

Aziz Rana, professor of constitutional law at Cornell University, explains the significance of provisions in the 2012 National Defense Authorisation Act that define the entire world as a battlefield, allowing for open-ended detainment of US citizens, without a trial.

Rana tells Al Jazeera that these provisions are merely the latest round in a long battle between Congress, the executive branch, and rights activists.

On the executive branch versus civil liberties:

“One of the positions in the legal community, for example, around the assassination of [Anwar] Al Awlaki, is that this is a constitutional violation.

But the executive branch has pretty systematically defended this - not that it can, under the Constitution - but it has systematically defended its ability to pursue a variety of different practices.

For example, various officials in speeches and statements have implied that the battlefield extends beyond Afghanistan or Iraq and indeed may be global. If an individual is suspected of engaging in terrorism but is in a friendly or non-hostile country – such as Yemen – that still would count as the battlefield. More [Al Jazeera/Photo:EPA]

Ten years ago, an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, set out to plan the future of the recently invaded country. Goals were set for the transfer of power in Afghanistan, as well as for security and for the development of institutions to uphold human rights.

A decade on, as yet another conference to plan the future of the country convenes in the same German city, Afghanistan’s future remains uncertain.

The country’s economy is far from stable, and its domestic security is rocked by regular explosions and assassination attempts targeting members of President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle.

Moreover, despite the big names and plenitude of national delegations, two parties are notably absent from ‘Bonn II’.

Neither the Taliban, who in recent months have been making their way back into Afghan politics via fragile peace talks, or Pakistan, a major influence on Afghanistan’s affairs, which is still fuming over a NATO airstrike which left 24 of its soldiers dead earlier this month, have chosen to attend.

It remains to be seen if, and how, the latest conference on Afghanistan will improve the country’s situation, but the absence of both parties, both crucial to security and stability in Afghanistan, does not bode well. More [Al Jazeera/Photo:AFP]