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Canada’s foreign minister John Baird is calling Syria’s offer to begin providing information on its chemical arsenal 30 days after it signs an international convention banning such weapons “ridiculous and absurd.” Baird said Syrian President Bashar Assad could not be given extra time. Baird said: “This is a man who up until a week ago denied that they had any such weapons.” …

In an exclusive interview with FRANCE 24 on Friday, US Senator John McCain acknowledged François Hollande’s support on Syria and noted that US inaction had put the French president in an “unfair political position”. US Senator John McCain has said he was worried US inaction had hurt the Syrian rebels’ campaign against President Bashar al-Assad and had put Washington’s allies, such as French President François Hollande, in an “unfair political position”. In an interview with FRANCE 24 on Friday, McCain said he feared the recent international focus on chemical weapons had given Assad an advantage in his use of conventional...

WASHINGTON — President Obama will not insist on a United Nations resolution threatening to use force to ensure that Syria lives up to its commitment to turn over chemical weapons, but will seek other tangible consequences for Syria if it does not comply, senior administration officials said Friday. Although Mr. Obama reserves the right to order a punitive military strike on his own without United Nations backing if Syria reneges, the officials said he understood that Russia, because of its veto power in the Security Council, would never allow a resolution that authorized such a use of force. France, which...

Syria’s President Bashar Assad on Thursday demanded that Israel ratify international treaties on non-proliferation of nonconventional weapons, and that the US promise not to attack his regime, as he set conditions for a negotiated resolution of the crisis over his chemical weapon. Assad said he would submit data on his country’s chemical weapons stockpile a month after signing an international convention banning the arms, adding that it was Russia, and not the US, that was making a negotiated solution possible. His comments were believed to mark Assad’s first formal acknowledgement that he has chemical weapons. Calling a month wait the...

An elite Syrian unit that runs the government's chemical arms program has been scattering the weapons to dozens of sites across the country, potentially complicating US plans for air strikes, the Wall Street Journal reported. The newspaper, citing unnamed US officials and lawmakers briefed on the intelligence, said on its website on Thursday that a secretive military group known as Unit 450 had been moving the stocks around for months to help avoid detection of the weapons. US and Israeli intelligence agencies and Middle Eastern officials still believe they know the location of most of the government's chemical weapons supply,...

Chinese diplomats in Syria as well as Beijing's embassy are under regular threat from rebel attacks, China's ambassador to Syria has confided to local media outlets. In an interview with the Global Times [ link at site], Zhang Xun, China's ambassador to Syria said that Beijing's embassy has increasingly been caught in the cross-hairs of fighting between rebel and government forces in recent months... Zhang said that in another attack last month, Syrian rebels fired mortar shells at President Bashar al-Assad's motorcade. They missed the Syrian leader but hit a building that was located just 10 meters from the Chinese...

I … don’t remember this being part of the offer. Obama had better run it past Putin right away to see how he wants the U.S. to respond. Syria will fulfil an initiative to hand over its chemical weapons only when the United States stops threatening to strike Syria, RIA news agency quoted President Bashar al-Assad as saying in a television interview… “When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalized,” he was...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad insisted that the U.S. give up its "policy of threats" and halt arms shipments to rebels before his government turns over its chemical weapons, as U.S. and Russian delegations began talks in Geneva aimed at forging a road map for the shutdown of the weapons program. Mr. Assad's comments, in his first public statement on the Russian proposal that Syria hand over its chemical weapons to an international monitors, underlined the distance between Syria and its backers in Moscow on one side and the U.S. and its allies on the other. Before starting their discussions, Secretary...

Syrian President Bashar Assad said his nation would give up its chemical arms only if the United States ends any weapons deliveries to opposition forces and ceases its "threatening" behavior. The Damascus leader made the remarks in a Russian television interview quoted on Thursday by the Washington Post. "When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalized,” Assad reportedly told Rossiya-24 television. He said Damascus would start disclosing details about its chemical assets...

The head of the opposition Free Syria Army, General Salim Idriss, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday that he has intelligence that the Assad regime is moving its chemical weapons out of the country. “Today we have information that the regime began to move chemical materials and chemical weapons to Lebanon and to Iraq,” General Idriss told Amanpour from inside Syria. It’s a huge claim that would fundamentally shift everything U.S. intelligence officials have in the past said they believe about the situation in Syria, CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr reports.

Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Geneva today for talks with Russia about Syria's chemical weapons and was met by a statement from the Syrian president that he was not surrendering the arsenal because of any U.S. threats. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Russian state-run news channel Rossiya-24 that his regime decided to hand over his massive cache of sarin, VX and mustard gas at Russia's suggestion. "Syria is handing over its chemical weapons under international supervision because of Russia. The U.S. threats did not influence the decision," Assad told the Russian TV. He said his government is...

I was looking for the news article where Rand Paul was talking about the atrocities being committed in Syria, the beheading of priests,children, etc, and stumbled upon this on Google - Twitchy posted this about Parish Match about one and a half hours ago. I won't provide a link to it, but thought people needed to know And now weapons are being provided by the CIA to Syrian rebels (WaPo article)?

Syrian rebels claim that the army of President Bashar Assad again used poison gas in an attack on rebel forces in the Damascus area Thursday, an Israel Radio report said. The report was based on rebel sources, who said the attack took place in the Jobar neighborhood of the capital. The rebel sources said they could not tell what kind of chemical weaponry had been used, but that it was a poison gas of some kind, and was causing injuries, including breathing difficulties.

“The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass   I did take notes during Big Guy’s Syrian argument/rebuttal last night. I must apologize, as they are a little sketchy; I figured that, as usual, I’d have a full hour of repetition in order to fill in the details. How did I know that he was going to wrap up the much-hyped contrapuntal speech on Syria in a mere 15 minutes?...

A flurry of diplomatic activity has overtaken the Senate debate on the use of force by the United States against Syria as punishment for/deterrence against the use of chemical weapons. The world awaits the next meeting, the next announcement, the next slip-of-the-tongue, or the first bomb. The interregnum is a good time to note that the president has been blaming the Iraq war for American reticence on war in Syria. "I'm not sure that we're ever going to get a majority of the American people -- after over a decade of war, after what happened in Iraq," he told PBS....

(CNSNews.com) – Pushing ahead his proposal to avert military strikes against his ally in Damascus by having it surrender its chemical weapons stocks, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday the initiative would only be feasible if the U.S. pledges not to use force. The plan will only work, he said in a statement released on the Kremlin website, “if the United States and other nations supporting it tell us that they’re giving up their plan to use force against Syria.” “You can’t really ask Syria, or any other country, to disarm unilaterally while military action against it is being contemplated.”...

Even before President Barack Obama put his plans to strike the Syrian regime on hold, he was losing the battle of public opinion about military intervention. Part of the credit, no doubt, goes to a successful media blitz by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and its supporters. In an interview aired on Monday night, Assad himself advanced his government's case to Charlie Rose, saying that the United States had not presented "a single shred of evidence" proving the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. Assad has always been able to skillfully parry Western journalists' criticisms of his regime -- and,...

Cairo: The Arab League will back a Russian plan to place Syrian chemical weapons under international supervision for eventual destruction, its secretary general said on Tuesday. Nabil al-Arabi told reporters in Cairo the League will 'soon issue a statement announcing its support officially' for the Russian plan... "If you remember, I always insisted that (the Syrian conflict) needs a political solution" Arabi said. But they fell short of calling for military strikes as proposed by Washington, with several members opposed to foreign intervention in Syria.

We rejoin Alice just after she drank the potion that made her small enough to slip down the rabbit hole: Since then, we marched to the brink of war with Syria only to be yanked back when Secretary of State Jean Carré downgraded it to le petit guerre. He advised us, and the world at the same time, that what we really had planned was not a war-war, butt an “unbelievably, small, limited” strike on Syria. More of a timeout than an armed conflict you see. And he promised we would only use very little planes, and the tiniest of...