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Roger Cohen Continue reading the main story Share This Page Email Share Tweet Save more Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions. For more than four years now, the war has festered. A country has been destroyed, four million Syrians are refugees, Islamic State has moved into the vacuum and President Bashar al-Assad still drops barrel bombs whose shrapnel and chlorine rip women and children to shreds. For a long time, those who fled waited in the neighborhood. They wanted to go home. They filled camps in Turkey and Jordan and Lebanon....

Russian offensive operations could launch from Bassel Al-Assad International Airport "very soon." The massive Condor flights carrying all kinds of supplies now arrive twice a day through Iran and Iraq into Bassel Al-Assad International Airport outside the port city of Latakia. The cargo is for Russian soldiers, not Syrian government forces, but is seen as a build-up to aid Bashar Assad's embattled regime. The defense official, briefed on the latest satellite photos of the Syrian coastline, said: "This is the largest deployment of Russian forces outside the former Soviet Union since the collapse of the USSR." The two additional Russian...

A virulent antipolice campaign has made police officers reluctant to do their jobs. The media amplify that message on a daily basis. “I’m deliberately not getting involved in things I would have,” a NY City officer says. “I won’t get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; only if there’s a violent felony committed in my presence.” Violent crime has surged. Homicides up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore compared with the same period in 2014. “There’s a total lack of respect out there for the police,” says a New York sergeant. “Perps feel...

'Go home!' After years of Eastern European migrants starting new lives in the UK now it's the turn of their own countries to complain about new arrivals Thousands of angry protesters took to the streets in Eastern Europe to voice their opposition to the influx of migrants into the region. 'Islam will be the death of Europe' chanted protesters at a rally in Warsaw, with the pre-dominantly Roman Catholic crowd reaching as many as 5,000 people. Hundreds of people also demonstrated in Prague and in the Slovak capital Bratislava, some holding banners reading: 'You're not welcome here so go home'.

The signing of a Munich-class agreement with Iran that hands it more than it ever hoped to pull off represents a shocking, craven American capitulation to an apocalyptic crazy state: a North Korea with oil. Nothing in Western history remotely approaches it, not even Neville Chamberlain’s storied appeasement of another antisemitic negotiating partner.

Opinion Journal’s Mary Kissel and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov on Obama’s foreign policy legacy and his new book Winter is Coming Plus, Iran deal politicking, Yemen’s terror haven, ObamaCare in court and California’s policing for profit. Video 14:01

Homosexual Activists Tell Kim Davis: ‘We Will Kidnap Your Husband, Tie Him Up And Force Him To Watch Us Raping You. We Will Burn You Alive.’ Civil Unrest Is Coming To America Homosexual activists are sending sadistic threats to Kim Davis, saying that they will capture her husband, tie him up and force him to watch them rape her. They also said that they will burn her house as they sleep and burn them to death. Here is the video with the full story and commentary: Kim Davis said in an interview:  They told my husband they were going...

Fifty years ago, nearly every single working-age American man had a job or was looking for one. That's not the case anymore. The labor force participation rate for men ages 25 to 54 stood at nearly 97% in 1965, but now hovers near a record low of 88%. That rate includes those who are working or have looked for a job in the past four weeks. If the participation rate had held steady, more than five million additional men would be in the workforce. Men are dropping out of the labor force in large part because they can't find positions...

Law enforcement agencies are on high alert this week due to violent threats coming from the Black Lives Matter movement. According to several Be On Look Out (BOLO) alerts sent from several law enforcement agencies and exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller, some members of the “#blacklivesmatter and #fyf911 are calling for the murder of more police officers on a site called blog radio.” One caller on the show says, “When those [expletives] are by themselves, that’s when when we should start [expletive]ing them up. Like they do us, when a bunch of them n**s takin’ one of us out,...

Syria: Russian Marines on the ground, Chinese Navy already in the Mediterranean September 10, 2015 11:31 AM MST ..snip.... While the American military has been downsized by leaps and bounds during the Obama years, it turns out that the Russians aren't the only ones flexing their military muscle in the Mediterranean Sea, which was once nicknamed an "American lake." As reported by the Sina.com Chinese news service and also on Beijing's official Ministry of Defense website, China's Navy and Marines are also filling the vacuum created by the absence of the once massive American presence in the Med. ..snip.... With...

The August jobs report was hardly reassuring.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported net job creation of 173,000, far below estimates.  There's no way to sugar-coat it, though White House officials attempted to do just that.  They pointed out that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.1%.  But that was because another 200,000 workers had simply given up trying to find a good job. Good jobs are not being created because economic expansion has stalled.  And expansion has stalled because Obama has presided over the greatest assault on free enterprise in our nation's history.   It didn't...

A Yazidi woman kidnapped and detained as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's personal sex slave has told how the ISIS leader repeatedly raped U.S. hostage Kayla Mueller – who he had taken as a secret bride. Speaking to MailOnline, blue-eyed Muna, 16, revealed that after his depraved jihadi cohorts ripped out Miss Mueller's finger nails, Baghdadi told her that she would become his wife 'by force'.

And as Sheriff David Clarke said last week, it is Obama himself who started the “War on Police”rhetoric top begin with. Well, today, Obama was in Boston for his Labor Day Speech, with hundreds of dignitaries invited, and police typically greeting the president after the event. Not this year. Because the Boston Police Union decided to show Obama what cops think of him…and BOYCOTTED it…leading Administration officials to send an angry response to the Mayor. From Gateway Pundit via Boston Herald: Jerry Flynn, a Lowell cop on leave while serving as executive director of the New England Police Benevolent Association,...

Those employed by government in the United States in August of this year outnumbered those employed in the manufacturing sector by almost 1.8 to 1, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 21,995,000 employed by federal, state and local government in the United States in August, according to BLS. By contrast, there were only 12,329,000 employed in the manufacturing sector. The BLS has published seasonally-adjusted month-by-month employment numbers for both government and manufacturing going back to 1939. In the first 50 years of the 76-year span since then, manufacturing out-employed government. But in August 1989,...

An alarming majority of Jews living in Europe today are afraid to reveal their Jewishness, a survey carried out by the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) published on Tuesday found. The data indicates a severe erosion in the sense of security felt by European Jews. The survey found that over 85% of Jews in Europe do not bring their children to synagogue on Rosh Hashana to hear the shofar, out of fear of anti-Semitism. According to Rabbi Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association, "rabbis and community leaders from all over Europe report that more and more Jews refrain...

Americans hoped the election of the first black president in 2008 would help heal the racial division that has plagued this country for much of its history, but nearly half of voters think just the opposite has occurred. Only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters believe President Obama has brought Americans of different races closer together, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Forty-seven percent (47%) think Obama has driven those of different races further apart instead. Twenty-seven percent (27%) say his words and actions have had no major impact either way. (To see survey question wording, click here.)...

Military prosecutors have reached into a section of military law seldom used since World War II in the politically fraught case against Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier held prisoner for years by the Taliban after leaving his post in Afghanistan. Observers wondered for months if Bergdahl would be charged with desertion after the deal brokered by the U.S. to bring him home. He was — but he was also charged with misbehavior before the enemy, a much rarer offense that carries a stiffer potential penalty in this case.

The most recent Census Bureau data reveals that of the $3.2 trillion in total expenditures by state and local governments in 2012, public education accounted for the highest percent at nearly 28 percent, California is home to what appears to be the most wasteful K-12 spenders. ... 11 of California’s 16 most-populated cities score in the bottom 25 of U.S. cities on standard tests. The worst performing cities have in common the very high percentages of households where English is not spoken as a first language. Research shows that the language barrier can have a disastrous effect on learning outcomes....

"The secretary made clear that if such reports were accurate, these actions could further escalate the conflict, lead to greater loss of innocent life, increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-ISIL coalition operating in Syria," the department said, using an acronym for Islamic State. It said Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed that discussions on the Syrian conflict would continue this month in New York, where the U.N. General Assembly meets. Media reports on Friday quoted U.S. officials as describing an increase in Russian military activity in Syria, expanding Moscow's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad...

For not doing their jobs, Obama defends Muslims but jails a Christian In May 2013, the Obama administration sued Star Transport, Inc., a trucking company based in Morton, Illinois, because it fired Muslim truck drivers who refused to drive trucks that were carrying alcoholic beverages.However, earlier this week, the Obama administration pursued federal action against Kim Davis, a Christian court clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and a federal judge put her in jail.Here’s my take on both of these incidents: if someone refuses to do their job, they should be fired. An...