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Syrian TV says Israeli warplanes attacked research center in Damascus province at dawn on Wednesday.

It’s difficult to not look at world events these days and feel as though we are sitting on a ticking time bomb. Things are heating up even more and the clock is now at about 30 seconds to midnight. One wonders where all this will lead… Well, if the current course is kept, straight into hell, probably. That is by design and has been planned on for a very long time.

This is an Excerpt... PNAS Study: Population Growth Will be Constrained by the Limits of Trading Virtual Water (Food) A new study has been released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which calls into question the unsustainable global food export system based upon unsustainable export volumes of virtual water.The first sentence sums it up: Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. … Most of the water we use is to produce the food we eat. With the world’s population that has doubled every 40...

Donor countries have pledged more than $1.5 billion for Syrians displaced by nearly two years of fighting, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, after a donor conference in Kuwait. Ban told the final session of the one-day conference that the meeting has "reached its target" of $1 billion of aid for Syria's neighbours hosting refugees and another $500 million to fund humanitarian work for 4 million Syrians afflicted by the civil war inside the country. But the funds are only expected to cover the coming months, highlighting the massive burden to cope with needs from Syria's civil war and its...

The preservationists of Timbuktu’s centuries-old artifacts have been holding their breath for weeks, waiting for the moment when the French military would seize back Mali’s ancient northern capital from the Islamic militants who have occupied it for 10 months. At stake were the city’s most precious treasures: tens of thousands of centuries-old, priceless calligraphed manuscripts, whose fate under the jihadists’ rule was deeply uncertain. In interviews with TIME on Monday, preservationists said that in a large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the Ahmed Baba Institute...

Russia is terminating the agreement on cooperation with the United States in the fields of law and drug enforcement, the Russian government said Wednesday, Jan 30, according to RIA Novosti. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has signed a relevant order to terminate the deal, the government said in a statement on its website. “The order was initiated by the Russian Foreign Ministry, as the above agreement is out of line with today’s realities and has exhausted its potential,” the statement said. The agreement was signed on September 25, 2002. As part of the deal, the United States provided financial assistance to...

North Korean parents 'eating their own children' after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state A starving man in North Korea has been executed after murdering his two children for food, reports from inside the secretive state claim. A 'hidden famine' in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae is believed to have killed up to 10,000 people and there are fears that incidents of cannibalism have risen. The grim story is just one to emerge as residents battle starvation after a drought hit farms and shortages were compounded by party officials confiscating food. Undercover reporters from...

NEW DELHI: Faced with a China that is aggressively pursuing its territorial interests in the South and East China Seas, Japan and India on Tuesday decided to coordinate moves and exercises in the first ever maritime dialogue held here. The India-Japan maritime dialogue was decided during a meeting of foreign ministers last April. Interestingly, India decided to hold a maritime dialogue with China over a month before the India-Japan decision. The Indian move to start talks with Japan ahead of the dialogue with Beijing points to a stress on New Delhi's security priorities. The Indian side was led by D...

(Reuters) - Israel will give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's administration around $100 million (63 million pounds) in tax revenues that had been withheld in retaliation for his statehood bid in the United Nations, Israeli officials said on Wednesday. The sum is roughly a third of the funds Israel is meant to have transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA) since November under interim peace accords, but has instead kept. ... PA tax authority official Ahmed al-Helou told Reuters that Israel spent the October levies to help pay off $200 million it says the Palestinians owe the Israel Electric Corporation. Israel said...

... The Star’s report Tuesday came from anonymous sources in the Defence Department. The CBC had to find out from French television that Canadian special forces are also operating in Niger, which borders on Mali. But then everything about Canada’s role in Mali is treated by Ottawa as a state secret. Canadians learned of the initial C-17 deployment only after Mali’s president tweeted the information on the internet. When that initial, one-week deployment was extended, we were first told not by our own government but by Mali’s ambassador to Canada. ... Meanwhile, who exactly are we fighting in Mali? The...

Suresh Sambandam of OrangeScape, Krishna Mehra of Capillary Technologies, Jaspreet Singh of Druva, Balaji Sreenivasan of Aurigo, Vivek Ravisankar of InterviewStreet - all have something in common, other than that they have been featured here for their accomplishments. They are all technology entrepreneurs who started their ventures in India over the past few years, built them to a significant level of success, and now they have all relocated to the US, or are in the process of relocating (themselves, not the companies). We have mentioned just five names. But there are more. And the one common reason for the move...

Whether or not Chuck Hagel is confirmed as our next defense secretary, his nomination has already done serious damage to U.S. credibility on Iran, thereby emboldening the most dangerous regime in the Middle East. To limit the damage, President Obama should choose someone else to lead the Pentagon. After all, the former Nebraska senator is the same person who has consistently opposed sanctions against Iran. He is the same person who wanted Washington to support Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization. The same person who voted against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group (at...

The Israeli elections, President Obama’s inauguration speech and the violence in Syria all feature prominently in Arab news Tuesday. >>SNIP<< Quoting French sources, A-Sharq Al-Awsat quotes an exchange between Syrian President Bashar Assad and the international envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi. According to the daily, Brahimi told Assad that he could not remain in power and that the opposition could defeat him, but the cost may be the complete destruction of Damascus. To that, Assad reportedly answered “I will win the war, even if Damascus is destroyed.”

What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat? After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama's response have been? My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of practicing the "politics of division" or some such and denied it. In any case, wouldn't an open debate have been better than putting women into combat by fiat? You'd think the folks who are always clamoring for a "national conversation" on this, that and the other thing would prefer to make a sweeping change after,...

A western diplomat and three regional security sources said Wednesday that Israel Air Force warplanes struck a target on the Syrian-Lebanese border overnight, hours after Lebanon reported a series of three overflights by Israel in its airspace. Israel has expressed increasing concern over the fate of Syrian chemical and conventional weapons as the country slides further into chaos after almost two years of civil war.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is likely to be confirmed today as the next Secretary of State after sailing through a Senate hearing last week. What does this mean for America and its foreign policy? As Heritage’s Helle Dale wrote after last week’s hearing: The bad news for the United States is that Kerry is President Obama’s ideological twin and can be expected to enthusiastically embrace the Obama doctrine and continue the Administration’s pursuit of arms control, international treaties, and climate-change agreements. This is a classic liberal agenda, which will only lead to a further erosion of American global leadership. Though...

There. I said it. You’d be surprised how long it has taken to say this. I’ve let multiple friends vet the various drafts of posts I’ve written on this and they all wind up arguing with each other over the details. Is it amnesty or isn’t it? Should we give a path to citizenship or not? We are getting in the weeds when the basics will do. I think this plan is warmed over McCain-Kennedy and will do nothing to solve the problem. I say this as someone to the left of much of the readership here at RedState and...

... According to a press release, three Congressional leaders sent a letter on Monday night to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, seeking documents related to the Dept. of State's Accountability Review Board (ARB) report on the failures that led to the attack that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. "Unfortunately, the ARB did not address some important questions about the attacks in Benghazi, which we believe may contain crucial lessons learned for other U.S. facilities abroad to follow,”the letter states, citingthe board’s failure to interview the Secretary and key deputies, a lack...

The FBI has raided the offices of Dr. Salomon Melgen, an opthalmologist and Democratic Party donor reportedly connected to New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez’s alleged solicitation of prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. The Miami Herald reports: FBI agents raided the West Palm Beach business of an eye doctor accused in the conservative press of providing free trips and even Dominican Republic prostitutes to New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez — who has denied what he calls the "fallacious allegations." Agents gathered at the medical-office complex of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a contributor to Menendez and other prominent politicians, late Tuesday night...

“A decade of war is now ending,” U.S. President Barack Obama declared Monday. Maybe that’s true in America, but it isn’t true anywhere else. Extremists are still plotting acts of terror. Authoritarian and autocratic regimes are still using violence to preserve their power. The United States can step back from international conflicts, but that won’t make them disappear. Fortunately, there is another power that shares America’s economic and political values, that possesses sophisticated military technology and is also very interested in stopping the progress of fanatical movements, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. That power is Europe. …...