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At least three gunmen were killed in clashes with Lebanese soldiers close to the border with Syria on Friday, a Lebanese security source said, in an area that has seen regular incursions from Islamist militants fighting in Syria's war. A group of gunmen launched a large-scale attack on an army outpost close to the village of Ras Baalbek, near Lebanon's eastern frontier with Syria, wounding at least five soldiers, and the army responded with artillery, the source said. It was not immediately clear which group the attackers belonged to but Syria-based jihadist groups such as al Qaeda's Nusra Front and...

In the wake of this weekend's Israeli strike in the Golan Heights, which killed Hezbollah operatives and an Iranian general, Sunday's comments by Syria's information minister are particularly illuminating. Omran Zoubi said the "cost of maintaining regional security is much lower than that of a huge deterioration that develops in a negative way," which can be read as an appeal for the Israelis to avoid taking things further. In contrast, officials from Hezbollah and have spoken openly about retaliation, something that used to threaten after Israeli strikes in the past. This demonstrates that the Syrian regime exists on paper, but...

Obama: Is he irrelevant, or an advocate for Iran-backed terror? Even as President Obama gave his State of the Union address to the joint chambers of Congress Tuesday night, another domino was falling in Iran’s line-up of nation-state influence. Yemen’s leadership was on the brink of capitulation just as Obama was gloating over a failed foreign policy as being effective. Others have already pointed out how facts of Yemen and Somalia’s chaos contradict the president’s previous glorying in those states as testaments of his policy’s success. His idea as to what qualifies as success appear to deviate from that of...

More doubts emerge about the supposed suicide. Sunday night Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found shot to death in his apartment. Nisman had been scheduled the following day to present his criminal complaint against Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner before a closed session of Argentina’s congress. The initial claim (one made by Kirchner herself on her Facebook page) that Nisman committed suicide hardly seemed credible at the time. How many people would kill themselves before the high point of their careers? Nisman had spent ten years investigating the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing in Buenos Aires and now he...

When Alberto Nisman’s body was found inside his Buenos Aires apartment with a bullet lodged in his head, questions immediately arose about the circumstances surrounding his death and the investigation he had been conducting into a 1994 car-bomb attack on an Argentinian Jewish center by Iranian terrorists that killed 85 people. "The Argentinian economy is in really dire straits, and they’re shut out of almost every foreign market, and their economic lifelines are drying up," Jason Marczak, deputy director of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Latino. "The Argentinians were forced to look...

The five most miserable countries in the world at the end of 2014 are, in order: Venezuela, Argentina, Syria, Ukraine, and Iran. In 2014, Argentina and Ukraine moved into the top five, displacing Sudan and Sao Tome and Principe. The five least miserable are Brunei, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The United States ranks 95th, which makes it the 14th least miserable nation

Tony Badran, Now Lebanon January 23, 2015 Israel dealt Iran a painful blow on Sunday when it struck a convoy of senior Iranian and Hezbollah commanders in Quneitra in the Golan Heights. Some Israeli former security officials have explained the strike as preemptive action against an imminent attack on northern Israel. They pointed to an interview by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah three days before, in which he talked about his fighters making incursions into the Galilee in the next war with Israel. Another anonymous Israeli official claimed that the presence of a high-ranking Iranian general in the convoy was a...

In response to the growing threat posed by the Islamic State terrorist group, the royal family of Saudi Arabia is having a 600-mile barrier constructed to completely block the Iraqi portion of the Saudi northern border, hoping to prevent ISIS militants from infiltrating the kingdom. The planned fence structure will span the entire distance of the Iraq-Saudi border, from Jordan to Kuwait. The border barrier system will feature five layers of barbed wire fencing, a ditch, a patrol road, 240 rapid response vehicles, underground motion sensors, 40 watchtowers, radar, day/night cameras, seven command centers, 28 communication towers, 32 military response...

Homeland Security: To keep out Islamic State terrorists, the Saudis are building a 600-mile-long barrier — complete with five layers of fencing, underground movement censors and radar cameras — on their northern border. If they can do it ... Good fences, it is said, make for good neighbors, which on a grand scale was the intent of the Great Wall of China in antiquity and the Israeli fences of more recent vintage. Both were designed to keep out intruders and to make sure all guests were invited guests. Unlike the Berlin Wall, they were built to keep hostiles out, not...

Middle Eastern Kingdom building 600-mile wall and ditch along its border with Iraq in effort to insulate itself from the chaos engulfing its neighbours. When a raiding party from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant attacked a Saudi border post last week, it was no mere hit on a desert outpost. The jihadists were launching an assault on the new, highest profile effort by Saudi Arabia to insulate itself from the chaos engulfing its neighbours. The Saudis are building a 600-mile-long “Great Wall” - a combined fence and ditch - to separates the country from Iraq to the north....

Saudi Arabia has charted a long-term course to drive down oil prices and maintain its major share of the global market—and a change of who is on the throne in Riyadh won’t likely alter this course, energy experts said. Even after the death of King Abdullah, announced early Friday, the kingdom is likely to continue to pump crude in the face of a global glut, which has helped push prices down by more than 55% since last June. Surrounded by unrest and uncertainty in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is protecting itself by exploiting its big advantages—huge oil reserves and...

Comments from world leaders in response to the death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who died early Friday in Riyadh.

The King Is Dead, Long Live the KingPosted By Robert Spencer On January 23, 2015 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments Abdullah was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Old Abdullah was as dead as a door-nail.So what now?The crown prince, Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Salman, has taken over, but it might not be that easy. After all, it wasn’t too many years ago that people were speculating about what Egypt would be like under the rule of Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal. And the accession of a 79-year-old to the throne does not...

(Note: This was written a month ago) With 91-year-old Abdullah’s hospitalization with pneumonia Jan. 2, all eyes in Saudi Arabia immediately turned to Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, the defense minister and the king’s 79-year-old half-brother. Yet due to Salman’s own deteriorating health – those close to the palace say the crown prince is suffering from the early stages of dementia – a campaign is growing within Riyadh to bypass Salman and give the throne to Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, 69, another of the king’s half brothers, should Abdullah be deemed unfit to rule. Both the crown prince...

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah died early on Friday and his brother Salman became king, the royal court in the world's top oil exporter and birthplace of Islam said in a statement carried by state television.

(CNN) —Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud has died, according to an announcement on Saudi state TV. He was 90. The next king will be Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, state television reported. The announcement of his death comes several weeks after the state-run Saudi Press Agency said Abdullah was suffering from pneumonia and had been admitted to the hospital....

DUBAI - A Saudi journalist and a member of the royal family denied rumors on Thursday that King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, in hospital since December suffering from pneumonia, had died, according to messages on social media. "All that is being reported about King Abdullah's death is far from the truth," Ibrahem al-Rawsa, identified as a journalist at state-run Saudi Press Agency, wrote on his Twitter account. A member of the royal family wrote: "I give you good news. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques is fine and there is no truth to the rumors going around." He was referring...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102292477

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is being treated for pneumonia and his condition has stabilized with the help of a breathing tube, according to a Royal Court statement issued Friday. The statement, which was released by Saudi state media, said the monarch, 90, had been transferred Thursday to a military hospital after experiencing shortness of breath and back pain. The Saudi Royal Court said medical tests showed the king had a respiratory infection. […] The health of the monarch is of extreme importance in the kingdom, where Abdullah holds absolute powers to enact laws and appoint ministers. His condition is also...

The 93-year old King of Saudi Arabia was sent to hospital on Wednesday for “medical checks” according to the Royal Court. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who has ruled Saudi Arabia since the death of his half-brother King Fahd in 2005, was admitted to the King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh, the latest in numerous trips to hospital by the aging monarch in recent years. The King underwent two operations in October 2011 and November 2012 due to "ligament slackening" in the upper back. The news of his entry to hospital prompted a 5 percent fall in Saudi Arabia’s main equities...

Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) (AFP) - King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned that the West will be the next target of the jihadists sweeping through Syria and Iraq, unless there is "rapid" action. "If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month," he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station. "Terrorism knows no border and its danger could affect several countries outside the Middle East," said the king who was speaking at a welcoming ceremony on Friday for new ambassadors, including a...

SMILED as soon as he heard the most famous war cry of Islam, “bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,” Arabic for “in the name of Allah the most gracious, the most merciful.” Watch Obama smile as soon as Bergdahl gives the most famous Muslim expression, the “Bismillah” or the “Basmallah”: ... The “basmallah” is the Islamic expression for victory and only indicates that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s father is a Muslim. Think that the man is acting as “Muslim” for a stealth operation to rescue his son who is already in good hands in Germany? And what is with the long beard and trimmed...

WASHINGTON — The United States is said to have disclosed that Saudi King Abdullah was dying. (Snip) The sources said the photograph was taken by White House personnel during Obama’s meeting with the Saudi king outside Riyad on March 28.“The Saudis specifically did not want any photograph that showed Abdullah with the tube,” a source said. “But there was a White House photographer that took the picture for what he said was history.” The photograph was said to have been relayed to members of the White House press corps. Within a day, an image of the Saudi king with the...

Massive IDF movement was report Thursday in Israel’s northern communities in wake of recent tensions in the area.

BEIRUT: A state of panic gripped Israeli northern towns Wednesday as the Jewish state braced itself for a possible Hezbollah reprisal over last week’s airstrike that killed six party fighters and a senior Iranian general in Syria’s Golan Heights. Israeli forces were placed on high security alert following reports, which later proved to be false, about an infiltration attempt by gunmen from Lebanon into Israel’s border. Rumors spread that gunmen were spotted sneaking into Israel from Lebanon, prompting Israeli authorities to ask residents in towns near the border to stay indoors. TV footage showed Israeli police and security forces deployed...

Israel Hits Pay Dirt with Strike on Iran & HezbollahPosted By Ari Lieberman On January 22, 2015 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi As Congress gets set to impose new sanctions on Iran and the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, Argentina’s indefatigable prosecutor, once again sheds the unwanted spotlight on the Islamic Republic’s overseas terror activities, the mullahs have been hit with yet more bad news. On January 18, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a convoy of military vehicles traveling on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights with devastating effect.The missile strike...

Foreign ministers from 21 countries are meeting in London to discuss ways to co-ordinate their efforts to combat the jihadist group Islamic State (IS). IS controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq and the US-led coalition has been carrying out air strikes since August. But UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond insisted much more needed to be done. He told the BBC that the countries wanted to find ways to halt the flow of recruits to IS, cut off its funding and "tackle the underlying narrative". At the start of Thursday's conference at Lancaster House, which he is co-hosting with Mr...

Syrian government airstrikes Tuesday killed at least 39 people, mostly civilians, in two main battlegrounds in the north of the country, a monitor said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based anti-regime monitoring group, said at least 27 people were killed in airstrikes that targeted a livestock market in the village of Khansaa, south of the city of Qamishli. Speaking to AFP, Observatory director Rami Abdel-Rahman said nine of those killed in the village of Khansaa near the town of Tal Hamis had been identified by his group as civilians. “More of the dead may be civilians too, but...

Last week, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged $200 million in non-military assistance to support countries affected by the campaign against ISIS during an ongoing six-day Middle East tour. Today ISIS released a video threatening to kill two Japanese hostages unless they receive a $200 million ransom in the next 72 hours. What the media is not telling you is the true scoop: one of these two Japanese is a Muslim jihadi who converted to Islam and that Tokyo is unlikely to pay a $200 million ransom to free the two hostages and if they are beheaded (which most likely they...

Tehran threatens to punish Jewish state following funeral procession of a top commander killed in Syria strike TEHRAN, Iran — Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders said Israel will be punished for killing one of its generals in a January 18 airstrike in Syria that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters. Nasser Soltani said “Israel will certainly pay for what it did.” He spoke during a funeral ceremony Wednesday for Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, who will be buried in his hometown of Sirjan in southeastern Iran on Thursday. Soltani was quoted by the state TV as saying that Allahdadi was...

Death of a ProsecutorPosted By Kenneth R. Timmerman On January 21, 2015 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean prosecutor who indicted top Iranian regime officials for the July 1994 AMIA Jewish Center bombing in Buenos Aires, was found dead by gunshot in his apartment on Sunday night, in what initially was called a suicide.Nisman was scheduled to address members of parliament the next day to reveal new information about alleged efforts by Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Hector Timerman, to cover up the responsibility of the Iranian regime...

Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri, an admitted former al Qaeda operative, has been released from a American jail and permitted to return home to Qatar. No formal statement has been released yet by either government, but it is being reported that al Marri's release was the result of a bilateral agreement between the Qatari and American governments. According to the US Bureau of Prisons, a prisoner with the same name and estimated age (ID number 12194-026) was freed on Friday. Additionally, a source from al Marri's family told the Qatari press he was recently released and arrived in Doha Saturday....

A suspected terrorist stabbed at least nine people on the 40 bus line in Tel Aviv near the Maariv junction on Wednesday morning. Two of the victims were seriously injured and several others suffered moderate injuries, Magen David Adom said. Others at the scene were treated for shock. The injured were evacuated to the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer and Ichilov Hospital at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv. The attacker fled on foot but was shot and neutralized by police and is being questioned. The assailant is a 23-year-old man from the West Bank city of Tulkarm, illegally...

Israeli police say they have shot an attacker who stabbed at least nine people on a bus in central Tel Aviv. The stabbing incident occurred on the Maariv bridge, police said, adding that the stabbings took place both in and outside the bus. At least two of the victims were in a critical condition......

Oil fell as much as 5 percent on Tuesday after the International Monetary Fund cut its 2015 global economic forecast and key producer Iran hinted prices could drop to $25 a barrel without supportive OPEC action.

Barack Obama is calling on Congress to authorise continued military action in the Middle East, following growing criticism that his existing air strikes in Iraq and Syria lacked the necessary legally underpinning. In excerpts from his sixth State of the Union speech released early by the White House, the president also suggests that the coalition fight against the Islamic State will continue for months if not years to come. “This effort will take time. It will require focus. But we will succeed,” he will say. “And tonight, I call on this Congress to show the world that we are united...

An Iranian general killed in an Israeli air strike in Syria was not its intended target and Israel believed it was attacking only low-ranking guerrillas, a senior Israeli security source told Reuters on Tuesday. The source declined to be identified because Israel will not confirm or deny whether it carried out the strike. Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Mohammed Allahdadi was killed along with a Hezbollah commander and the son of the group's late military leader, Imad Muughniyeh, in Sunday's attack on a Hezbollah convoy near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Supreme leader publishes pictures of him with slain Hezbollah commander and his father; Guards leader warns of ‘devastating lightning’ against Israel Iranian officials threatened harsh retaliation against Israel Tuesday over a reported airstrike two days earlier, as the country’s supreme leader highlighted his personal connection with Jihad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander who was killed in the attack. Revolutionary Guards chief Mohammad Ali Jafari said that Israel should anticipate “devastating lightning,” according to the Iranian Tasnim news agency, and that Iran would widen its support for Muslim fighters in the Middle East “until the final collapse of the Zionist regime.” Several...

Just for a little background watch this from the end of September: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTHKGXpKQvA Fast forward to today: "CNN – Yemen’s presidential palace has been completely taken over by Shiite Houthi rebels, the country’s Minister of Information Nadia Sakkaf told CNN on Tuesday amid reports of renewed clashes. Sakkaf said the Prime Minister’s residence was also under attack from the street. She called the situation “the completion of a coup,” adding that “the President has no control.”" What a success story! Obama really knows how to pick’em.

Yemen’s powerful Shiite Houthi rebels shelled the residence of the country’s embattled president Tuesday and simultaneously swept into the presidential palace in the capital, Sanaa, as a top military commander warned that a full-fledged “coup” was underway. President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi was inside the residence as it came under “heavy shelling” for half an hour but he was unharmed and protected by guards, officials said. In New York, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting over the chaos in Sanaa. The shelling was a dramatic development that put the U.S.-backed Hadi into a precarious position and represented the...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran and Russia signed an agreement Tuesday to expand military ties in a visit to Tehran by the Russian defense minister. Sergei Shoigu, in remarks carried by Russian news agencies, said Moscow wants to develop a "long-term and multifaceted" military relationship with Iran. He said that the new agreement includes expanded counter-terrorism cooperation, exchanges of military personnel for training purposes and an understanding for each country's navy to more frequently use the other's ports. Iran's Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan urged greater cooperation as a means of opposing American ambitions in the region. Moscow and Tehran have...

Iran on Monday promised that Hezbollah would deliver “crushing response” to the Israeli attack over the weekend, which killed six Iranian agents, including a top-level commander, and five Hezbollah members. “The experience of the past shows that the resistance current will give a crushing response to the Zionist regime’s terrorist moves with revolutionary determination and in due time and place,” Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), was quoted as saying. The Israeli strike came just days after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that the terror group was preparing for a war in Israel’s northern Galilee...

The White House has released a couple of excerpts of the president's address to the nation. Here's the second: “But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one...

The Obama White House and the State Department under the management of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “changed sides in the war on terror” in 2011 by implementing a policy of facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya attempting to oust Moammar Gadhafi from power, the Citizens Commission on Benghazi concluded in its interim report. In WND interviews, several members of the commission have disclosed their finding that the mission of Christopher Stevens, prior to the fall of Gadhafi and during Stevens’ time as U.S. ambassador, was the management of a secret gun-running program operated...

The second House Benghazi Select Committee hearing took place last month. In one notable exchange between Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr, Gowdy asked for the name of the person the Committee needed to speak with to find out what the policy objectives were in Libya. “How can we judge whether or not a policy has failed or succeeded if nobody tells us what the policy objectives were? Who should we bring in to explain why were we in Libya?” Gowdy asked. As previously reported, documents confirm “we” were in Benghazi...

In what Yemen's information minister described as an "attempted coup" Shia Houthi rebels (backed by Hizbollah and Iran) have surrounded the Yemeni Presidential Palace putting them, as The Telegraph reports, in direct confrontation with al-Qaeda and the Yemen government., Amid hopes of a compromise deal or cease-fire in the conflict that has been under way since September when the Houthis swept into Sana'a, the latest reports are the nation has gone from bad to worse... YEMENI PM SAID SURROUNDED BY HOUTHI MILITIAS: CNN YEMEN INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS GOVERNMENT HAS LOST CONTROL OVER COUNTRY -- CNN Oil prices, interestingly, fell on...

Hezbollah supporters turned out in force on Monday to bury the son of the group's late commander, one of six fighters who died in an Israeli air strike in neighboring Syria that also killed an Iranian general. The killings raised the possibility of a retaliatory attack, with a senior Iranian official suggesting that Israel would be hit at "the right time and right place". An Israeli defense official said escalation was possible. Jihad Mughniyeh was buried in Beirut alongside his father Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated in Damascus in 2008. Though it was unclear what role Mughniyeh, who was in...

Iran's revolutionary guards' corps (IRGC) has confirmed that one of its senior commanders, general Mohammad Ali Allahdadi (or Dadi), has been killed by an Israeli strike on the Syrian sector of the Golan Heights. The air raid, which also killed six members of Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah group, occurred near Syria's Quneitra border crossing with Israel. "Following the Zionist aggressions against the resistance in Syria, General Mohammad Allahdadi, a former commander of the Sarollah Brigade of the Revolutionary Guard, was martyred along with Jihad Moughniyah and three others in the same car," the Dana news website said. The senior commander was...

Israelis live under the constant threat of terrorist attacks. Just overnight, Israel rolled up a six-member cell linked to the Islamic State with the alleged orders to execute strikes against Israeli targets inside the Jewish stateÂ’s territory. On IsraelÂ’s borders, Hamas to the south and Hezbollah to the north represent a constant terrorist threat. IsraelÂ’s ability to defend its borders by executing strikes on terrorist targets is further complicated by the fact that any one of those strikes could ignite an international incident by accidently killing a high-ranking military officer from one of those terror groupsÂ’ state sponsors. That...

Western intelligence sources say son of late Hezbollah leader Mughniyeh was planning attacks on Israel, received direct Iranian sponsorship. Following reports of an IAF helicopter strike on Sunday that targeted a convoy of Hezbollah operatives and killed 10, Hezbollah-run television in Lebanon indicated the incident could prompt a "costly" surge in tensions in the region. On Sunday evening, the al-Manar news channel said the attack suggested that "the enemy has gone crazy because of Hezbollah's growing capabilities and it could lead to a costly adventure that will put the Middle East at stake." Western intelligence sources reported Sunday that Jihad...