Enjoy.

If the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Palestinian Authority's U.N. statehood bid, and Israel's planned settlement expansion have you feeling powerless about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may just be in luck. The Atlantic has partnered with the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and SAYA/Design for Change to create a data-heavy interactive tool that allows you to choose the Israeli settlements to annex as part of the creation of a Palestinian state. The Atlantic's Zvika Krieger explains how it works:

The challenge is to include as many Israelis as possible within Israel's new borders while still allowing for the creation of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state. Former negotiators as well as numerous scholars and NGOs have tried their hands at this task; now it is your turn.

Users are presented with a map of the West Bank, and can pick which settlements they think should be included within Israel's borders as part of a final-status agreement. Hovering over each settlement will show its population numbers and how disruptive its annexation would be for Palestinian contiguity. (Users can also select settlements to include or exclude from a list of settlements, organized by population size or alphabetically.) Users can also see the most recent Israeli and Palestinian border proposals (as well as the route of Israeli security barrier and the Geneva Initiative's border proposal) grafted onto the map as a reference point in devising their own border.

For every settlement a user chooses to include within Israel, a ticker at the bottom of the page tabulates how many of the 500,000 Israelis living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would be included or excluded from Israel's new borders. It also calculates how much land would be annexed - which is the amount of land that Israel would likely have to swap to Palestinians from within Israel proper. When users are satisfied with their Israeli annexations of the West Bank, they are shown scenarios of what land from Israel would be swapped to the new Palestinian state. Finally, the tool allows users to create a printable and savable version of the map they created, which can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and across the web.

Try your hand at the nitty-gritty of conflict-resolution here (the screenshot above shows a scenario in which Israel annexes roughly 3 percent of the West Bank where around 400,000 Israelis live). I haven't felt this in control of world affairs since I singlehandedly selected the year in which China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy. 

Hey, if the Israelis and Palestinians can move their fighting partially online, perhaps they can digitize the peace process as well. 

Chinese tourists can tour dozens of amusement parks, cities, and villages featuring copied wonders around the world, from Eiffel Towers to the White House to the Manhattan skyline, without ever leaving the country. But with all these imitations of foreign wonders, what if they want to visit someplace archetypically Chinese? 

Well, there's always Australia. From CNN: 

"There will be no rides or rollercoasters or compulsory dragon motifs. Instead, the park will focus on China's rich cultural offerings, including streets dedicated to Chinese tea and wine cultures, as well as traditional Chinese medicine.

"Whatever things that are usually connected with Chinese culture will be featured in the park," said ACTP spokesperson Amanda Li...

The park will include a nine-story pagoda, modeled after the Jing’an Temple in Shanghai, as well as gardens and courtyards in styles from different dynasties. "

Have fun with that, post-modernists.  Also I've been out of China for nearly a year, but if memory serves, Chinese wine culture is mixing a bottle of Great Wall with Sprite or Diet Coke. 

The Washington Post brings a distressing story for those of us in the business of generating blog posts/clickbaiting slideshows about Russia's photogenic autocrat:

What's a 60-year-old president to do? The answer comes in a purportedly secret Kremlin policy paper: Forget the jet-piloting, bare-chested hunter look. Cue the wise elder statesman.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismisses such talk as utterly ridiculous. But it surfaced earlier this week in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, which reported that it had obtained a Kremlin document arguing for the Putin rebranding, while embracing the milder liberals around him instead of the hard-talking tough guys. Political analysts took the story as a trial balloon and offered their own ideas of a touch-up.

"No wrinkles, absolutely not," Alexei Makarkin said. "No gray hair."

Yes, said Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, Putin should stop diving into the sea and returning with ancient Greek amphoras, one photo op that was later acknowledged as staged. He should stop dressing as a crane and flying a glider to guide birds into the wild. But in ancient Russia, he should not look old.

We'll always have Sochi. If an image makeover is actually coming, it also seems possible it may be related to the mysterious injury Putin appears to have suffered in recent months. 

Today on FP, Simon Shuster writes about how Putin's seemingly cosmetic "corruption crackdown" may be spiraling out of control. 

As climate talks continue to grind along in Doha, food security would seem to be a major concern (especially as the U.N. issues warnings about the increasingly desperate food situation in Syria).  However, the question of how farmers will feed the world's booming population while adjusting to changing weather patterns appears to have been sidelined even as this year's crippling drought in the U.S. sent grain prices to record highs.

That doesn't mean, however, that the race for food security hasn't already begun. As the authors of the recently released book The Global Farms Race argue, cash-rich but resource-poor governments have been quietly making controversial bids for the arable fields of foreign lands to shore up their own food security. Since the 2008 global food crisis, these "land grabs" -- considered an economic lifeline by supporters and neocolonialism by critics -- have been booming. The editors of the book note a 2011 Oxfam study that claimed nearly 230 million hectares of land have been sold or leased since 2001, mostly after 2008 (that's about the size of Western Europe). In one of the most publicized deals, the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics leased 3.2 million acres in Madagascar in 2008 to grow corn and palm oil so that the company could "ensure our food security." The deal, which was eventually canceled, was so unpopular domestically that it contributed to an uprising that helped to oust Madagascar's President Marc Ravalomanana.

While that deal fell apart, countless others have gone through, sparking debates over the economic, environmental, and political implications of exporting crops from food-insecure countries. As Michael Kugelman, co-editor of the book with Susan L. Levenstein, said at a book launch event at the Wilson Center on Tuesday, this development marks "a new phase of the global food crisis" -- one that may help countries importing food, but has grave implications for the countries hosting the crops. One of the disaster scenarios of these large-scale investments is that they will recreate scenes straight out of the Irish Potato Famine, during which crops were shipped out of the starving nation to feed wealthy foreigners. But equally urgent are the day-to-day economic, environmental, and political ramifications of the deals, from the effects of clearing forest to make way for new farmland to the implications of replacing food crops with biofuels. 

Defenders of this type of direct foreign investment often tout the willingness of investors to share technology -- such as seeds for drought-resistant plants and satellite monitoring for crops -- with the host nation. However, corrupt governments willing to offer deals that don't benefit their own populations compromise these promises of development. (Unlike the land-grabs of yore, host governments solicit many of these deals. According to Kugelman, Pakistan offered a 100,000-strong security detail to protect the property of foreign investors and other countries have offered "fire sales" on land in the form of tax write-offs).

As the book acknowledges, these deals are most likely here to stay, so the focus is on minimizing the potential conflict over the contentious real estate. Many of the policy recommendations provided by the book lean toward community supported agriculture programs: Wealthy nations contracting directly with small-scale farmers to meet food needs while also providing them with the technology and capital to improve their yields. While that's all well and good, the willingness and ability of foreign investors to abide by these recommendations seems doubtful, especially given the difficulty of enforcing even well-established international economic rules.

The inability of the current multilateral climate talks to make meaningful headway on even a single key issue highlights the inherent problem with these arrangements. "You can have all the rules and regulations for land rights," contributor Derek Byerlee, the World Bank's former Rural Strategy advisor, said on Tuesday, "But you have to be able to implement them." 

And you thought your company's meetings were too long. Jack Davis of InsightCrime writes:

A Federal Police recording recently heard by Folha de Sao Paulo involves a 10-hour discussion between five members of the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital - PCC) gang. The conversation involved two inmates and three gang members based outside of the prison. According to the newspaper, the talk was all business: topics included trafficking drugs to Paraguay and Bolivia, and the distribution of marijuana and cocaine inside Brazil.

The call, recorded on February 10, 2011, was one of many recorded between October 2010 and May 2012 as part of an ongoing investigation known as Operation Leviatã, targeting organized crime in Sao Paulo. The Ministry of Justice, which is currently processing the recordings, said that on average such conference calls involve four gang members, although recordings illustrate that as many nine gang members have taken part in a single call.

Past 6 hours or so, I'd say it's not so much a meeting as telecommuting.

Hat tip: Dan Trombly

According to the website NKnews.org, deceased North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had a Palestinian "foster child;" Jindallae Safarini, the daughter of the former Palestinian ambassador to North Korea:

"Her parents had reportedly not been able to have children during their ten-year stay in Pyongyang from 1982-1992. Upon hearing this, Kim Jong Il apparently assigned fertility experts to the couple and, following successful treatment, suggested they name her "Jindallae", after the Korean rendering of "azalea," an eye-catchingly pink flowering shrub, not too dissimilar from the Kimilsungia flower, named after Kim Il Sung by the first president of Indonesia."

Isolated North Korea has pretty good relations with several Arab states and organizations; though it's not every day one hears about Kim Jong Il's Palestinian foster daughter. NK News also features a documentary of Safarini which ran on North Korean television.