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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said on Sunday the Middle East would be more stable if Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were still in power in Libya and Iraq, saying it's "not even a contest". Trump mentioned the countries in comparison to current efforts to drive Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out of power. "You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there, it's a mess," Trump said on NBC. "If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there, it's a mess. It's going to be...

A rare 3,000-year-old seal, from the time of King David in the 10th century BCE, was recently discovered by a 10-year-old Russian volunteer at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Sifting Project. Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder and director of the project – which sifts through thousands of tons of illegally removed earth from the contested holy site in 1999 by the Wakf religious trust to build a mosque – said that the finding is unprecedented. “The seal is the first of its kind to be found in Jerusalem,” said Barkay, a world-renowned archaeologist and Israel Prize laureate, who has led the project for...

Israel captured the Old City and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, and later annexed the areas. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state. Some 300,000 Palestinians live in Jerusalem, making up about a third of the city's population. They live in the predominantly Arab eastern district and have residency status in the city, but do not hold Israeli citizenship.

The Obama administration tried to persuade Argentina to “provide the Islamic State of Iran with nuclear fuel” back in 2010. President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner made these accusations during her speech this week to the General Assembly. Nuclear fuel is a key component in nuclear weapons. This United States mainstream media ignored this story for some odd reason?

The death toll has climbed to 22 following an airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that struck a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders Saturday. Ten of those killed were patients, including three children, according to Doctors Without Borders/Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF). The other 12 were staff members, said MSF. In a statement, the coalition in Afghanistan acknowledged that U.S. forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz early Saturday at 2:15 a.m. local time "against insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces in the city of Kunduz. The strike was conducted in the vicinity of...

The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin has blindsided Barack Obama in the Middle East, catching the U.S. off-guard. It’s another Obama “failure,” we’re told. “Obama administration scrambles as Russia attempts to seize initiative in Syria,” is how a Washington Post headline described it. A popular cartoon shows Putin kicking sand in the faces of Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry on a beach. - snip - Here’s how her story began: “Moscow’s rapid military buildup in Syria is a result of the ‘reset’ in relations forged with the Russian and Iranian governments by the Barack Obama administration. The...

While the US has certainly made some epic strategic blunders in Syria that raise serious questions about just how “intelligent” US intelligence actually is, there’s little doubt that if one were to look behind all of the media parroting, the Pentagon and Langley understand all too well what’s going on in the Middle East. That is, the significance of the Russia-Iran “nexus” in Syria isn’t lost on anyone in the US military and you can bet there have been quite a few high level discussions over the past 72 hours about the best way to counter Moscow and Tehran’s powerplay...

The question on everyone's mind is: will the United States and its European and regional Sunni allies intervene to stop President Vladimir Putin from reversing the gains made by mainstream Syrian rebels after more than four years of war? Few are holding their breath. Many say, often with vehemence, that the current drama is the consequence of ongoing Western inaction and U.S. retreat at critical moments in an ever more uncontrollable conflict, whose regional dimensions are fast becoming global. Nobody in the Middle East is counting on U.S. President Barack Obama. The gloomy prediction of most is that a war...

Russia's intervention in Syria will curtail the spread of terrorism and help deal a fatal blow to Islamic State in the war-torn country, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said on Saturday. Russia launched air strikes in Syria on Wednesday in its biggest Middle East intervention in decades, marking a dramatic escalation in a more than four-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake. "Russia's entrance, given its potential and capabilities, is something we see is going to have an effect on limiting terrorism in Syria and eradicating it," Shoukry said in a televised interview...

LONDON: Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly sending 150,000 soldiers to Syria to wipe out the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). According to The Daily Star, he is apparently mounting an enormous military mission to take control of the terror group's stronghold of Raqqa. Raqqa is the self-declared capital of ISIS which is patrolled by as many as 5,000 jihadi members. Putin is set to mobilise 150,000 reservists whom he conscripted into the military earlier this week.

KABUL — The acting governor of Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province said Sunday that Taliban fighters had been routinely firing “small and heavy” weapons from the grounds of a local hospital before it was apparently hit by a U.S. airstrike over the weekend. In an interview, Hamdullah Danishi said the Doctors Without Borders compound was “a Taliban base” that was being used to plot and carry out attacks across the provincial capital, Kunduz city. “The hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban,” Danishi said. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there. We tolerated their firing...

The Australian government’s focus on national security and the war on terror to tackle Islamic extremism, rather than social cohesion and inclusion, has helped create an environment for radicalized Muslim youth to emerge in disproportionate numbers, experts say.Authorities in Australia are grappling with a rise in violence perpetrated by teenagers at home as well as battling to halt the flow of those who are attempting to travel to Syria to fight with Islamic extremists. The murder of a police accountant in Sydney on Friday by a boy of Iraqi-Kurdish descent is the latest in a spate of attacks linked to...

The Supreme Court said Thursday it hear an appeal from Iran's central bank over a $1.75 billion judgment awarded to victims of terrorist attacks, including the 1983 bombing that killed 241 Marines in Lebanon. The justices agreed to review a ruling from the federal appeals court in New York that said the judgment against Bank Markazi could be distributed to several hundred victims and families of those killed or injured in attacks sponsored by the government of Iran. The bank had argued that seizing the assets would conflict with treaty agreements between the United States and Iran. The money is...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A Palestinian stabbed and wounded an Israeli teenager in Jerusalem on Sunday and was then shot dead by police, authorities said, just hours after a similar assault killed two people in the city. Violence has risen in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank in recent weeks. Though not at the levels of previous Palestinian uprisings, or "Intifadas," it has triggered concerns of a wider escalation. Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the victim was taken to hospital in moderate condition and that police men "saw the terrorist holding a knife, shot and neutralized him." The attack happened...

One of the Clintons’ oldest and most trusted legal advisers has urged Hillary to hire a criminal defense attorney to represent her in case she’s indicted for mishandling classified documents on her private e-mail server and for lying under oath. The adviser, who has been a Clinton confidant for more than 30 years, laid out his concerns about Hillary’s legal exposure in a wide-ranging interview. “This e-mail thing is spiraling out of control,” he said. “To paraphrase John Dean of Watergate fame, it’s a cancer on her candidacy. “Frankly,” he continued, “I am used to my advice on legal matters...

Three days into its bombing campaign in Syria, Russia on Friday at last targeted Islamic State positions, striking at the defacto capital of the terror organization and at least one other site. The Russian strikes at the Islamic State came after two days in which its aircraft attacked locations belonging to other fighting groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad, including CIA-supported rebels, sparking calls for the Obama administration to do something to protect fighters it had trained and equipped. But President Barack Obama made clear that the U.S. had no plans to deepen its role in Syria. “We’re not...

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said he favors committing U.S. ground troops to a multinational military coalition that would enter Syria and create safe zones for refugees fleeing the war-torn nation. Johnson, a first-term Republican, spoke Friday at Madison-Kipp Corp. in Madison, at an event to mark Wisconsin Manufacturing Month. -snip- Johnson said he doesn’t know how many U.S. ground troops would be required for the effort. Russia’s recent involvement in the region may complicate it, he added. -snip- Johnson’s Syria stance puts him in line with other hawkish GOP senators, including Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain...

On Thursday, in “Mid-East Coup: As Russia Pounds Militant Targets, Iran Readies Ground Invasions While Saudis Panic”, we attempted to cut through all of the Western and Russian media propaganda on the way to describing what Moscow’s involvement in Syria actually portends for the global balance of power. Here are a few excerpts that summarize what’s taking shape in the Middle East: Putin looks to have viewed this as the ultimate geopolitical win-win. That is, Russia gets to i) expand its influence in the Middle East in defiance of Washington and its allies, a move that also helps to...

In March, an investigation by ProPublica and Gawker revealed that a “secret spy network” that was not on the State Department payroll, run by longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, was “funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack.” Now the WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes. According to...

(Conservative Tribune) – Lost in the media hype surrounding the addresses of Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday was a bombshell claim by the president of Argentina. President Christina Fernandez de Kirchener announced that her nation had been approached by an Obama administration official with a request that Argentina provide enriched nuclear fuel to the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2010. The official in question was Gary Samore, former White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, who did not dispute the seemingly outrageous claim and has been open...