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The Royal Air Force (RAF) will start dropping humanitarian aid supplies in northern Iraq "imminently", the foreign secretary has said.Philip Hammond said the aid would help thousands of members of the Yazidi minority, who are trapped on a mountain after fleeing from Islamist militants.Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama discussed the situation over the phone earlier.No 10 said they had agreed "a way must be found... to avert a genocide".The Downing Street spokesman said estimates of the number of those trapped ranged from 50,000 to 150,000.He said there was little information about what supplies they had with...

ISIS is now taunting Americans on the hashtag #AmessagefromISIStoUS

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military launched four airstrikes Saturday in northern Iraq designed to defend members of the Yazidi religious minority who were coming under attack from Islamic extremists, U.S. officials said. American aircraft also conducted a third airdrop of food and water for thousands of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar, officials said. One C-17 and two C-130 aircraft dropped 3,800 gallons of drinking water and 16,128 meals, and were supported by U.S. fighter aircraft. [....] In the first, U.S. fighters and drones struck one of two Islamic State armored personnel carriers seen firing on Yazidi civilians near the town of Sinjar,...

To get to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad you first must present proper identifying credentials to pass Iraqi army checkpoints. Then turn through Assassin’s Gate, into what’s now known as the International Zone, or IZ. Nearing the banks of the Tigris, you turn right onto a boulevard, see the first guard tower marking the embassy compound, then drive—and drive—some minutes fronting its fortress-high walls before you reach an entry gate. The embassy—opened in 2009 at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of over $750 million—is the largest diplomatic compound in the world. At 104 acres (that’s 80 football stadiums) it’s about...

U.S. President Barack Obama is considering airstrikes and emergency relief airdrops to help 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who are trapped on a mountaintop after threats by Islamic militants, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Obama has been looking at a range of options, from dropping humanitarian supplies on Mount Sinjar to military strikes on fighters from the Islamic State who are at the base of the mountain, a senior administration official told the newspaper. The Islamic State's Sunni militants, an offshoot of al Qaeda who have swept across northwestern Iraq in recent weeks, have even come within a...

In this dispatch, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky interviews an American volunteer in the Donbas Battalion to find out why he joined the unit, and what he thinks about the crisis in Ukraine.

As many as 12 Western soldiers -- including several Americans -- were shot in a deadly attack on high-level officials visiting a military academy Tuesday near Afghanistan's capital. U.S. officials told NBC News that most, if not all, of the victims were American. They said a lone gunman opened fire at a group that included American officials at the Camp Qargha training facility. Three Western soldiers died - including a high-ranking officer - and about a dozen were wounded, according to senior U.S. defense officials. The officials said the death toll is expected to rise. Earlier, a spokesman for the...

RUSH: Now, there's a very upsetting story out of the Afghanistan war today. Headline: "United States Army Major General Killed by an Afghan Soldier -- A United States Army major general was shot and killed at close range on Tuesday by a man dressed as an Afghan soldier at a training academy on the outskirts of Kabul..." By the way, you might hear it pronounced "Kah-BOOL," but it isn't. It's "KAH-bull," K-a-b-u-l. "The officer was the highest-ranking member of the American military to die in hostilities in the Afghanistan war. The coalition official, who spoke on condition of anonymity and...

Two weeks ago, the British medical journal Lancet, considered to be one of the world’s leading medical publications, published “An open letter for the people in Gaza.” Signed by four European doctors on behalf of 20 others (17 from Italy and three from the UK), the letter had virtually nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it was a grotesque attack on Israel. Some excerpts: “We ask our colleagues, old and young professionals, to denounce this Israeli aggression.” “Israel’s behaviour has insulted our humanity, intelligence, and dignity as well as our professional ethics and efforts.” “We challenge the perversity of a...

LONDON (AP) — The U.K.'s first female Muslim Cabinet member resigned Tuesday in protest of the British government's policies on Gaza, describing the approach as "morally indefensible" and detrimental to the national interest. Sayeeda Warsi, a Foreign Office minister of Pakistani descent, announced her departure on her Twitter feed. The move apparently took Downing Street off guard, and loaded more pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron, who is under fire by the opposition and members of his own party for his staunch support of Israel.

Folks.  Ross Perot was lambasted for using the term.  Now the president uses it as often as the “you can keep…” and “period” verbiage.  As always and forevermore, it is not what is said, but who says it. Folks.  As if those who went through enhanced interrogations were snatched from a Norman Rockwell scene and placed on a waterboard.  Hardly.  The president, and the attorney general, still seem bent on proving that the Bush administration engaged in “torture.”  We seem to forget the moment in history in which the procedures in question were conducted.  Did Obama and Holder see the...

The Qataris, and their ruling al-Thani family, are slavers, narcotics traffickers, and financiers of international terrorism. They also happen to be America’s closest ally under Obama. When analyzing the foreign policy interventions of the Obama administration with respect to the Middle East, it is hard to reconcile their respective approaches Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014). In 2011, Obama justified the military action to remove Muammar Gaddafi on the basis of anticipated genocide by the Gaddafi regime. Speaking at the National Defense University on March 28, 2011, Obama explained “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves...

...Israel-Hating, Hamas-Forgiving, Marcher, Celebrity, News Anchor, Journalist, Writer, Media Star, Politician, Head Of State I’m not sure the people who need to hear this will ever hear it, but I want my conscience to be clear that I said it to them. We have seen you marching along the streets of Europe, America, and the Middle East with your signs and kafias and Palestinian flags. We have heard you screaming to whoever will listen that Jews and Israelis are murderers, war criminals, and baby killers. You think you are telling us who we are. But actually, you are telling us...

One of the things I enjoy about this website is the opportunity to educate, edify, and challenge us all to think beyond the obvious. Now I realize some folks are — as we say in the military — “stuck on stupid” and it will take longer to get them with the program. But it is a challenge I accept. So, in that light, I’d like to invite you to scour the annals of American history in order to respond to President Barack Hussein Obama’s recent assertion that Muslims have contributed “to building the very fabric or our nation.” As reported...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Senate report on the CIA's interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks concludes that the agency initially kept the secretary of state and some U.S. ambassadors in the dark about harsh techniques and secret prisons, according to a document circulating among White House staff. The still-classified report also says some ambassadors who were informed about interrogations of al-Qaida detainees at so-called black sites in their countries were instructed not to tell their superiors at the State Department, the document says. The 6,300-page Senate report on the CIA's interrogation program has been years in the making....

Analysis: Islamic State advertises war crimes in video By Thomas Joscelyn July 29, 2014 The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that controls significant territory in both Iraq and Syria, has posted an extremely brutal video. While most Muslims were celebrating the end of Islam's holy month, the Islamic State is celebrating mass executions. Warning: Some of the images below are graphic. The Long War Journal is posting these images because they highlight the depravity of the Islamic State and its followers. The Islamic State likely believes that these images will help intimate its opposition into submission and earn new...

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Fusion TV´s Jorge Ramos that part of the reason Hamas hides rockets in schools and civilian areas is "Gaza is small." "I´m not a military planner but Hamas puts it´s missiles, it´s rockets in civilian areas, part of it is Gaza is pretty small and its densely populated," she said as neglecting the question of whether or not Hamas should have rockets in area to begin with.

Thousands attend EID prayer at Toyota Park BY NICK SWEDBERG Correspondent Updated: July 29, 2014 2:08AM Thousands of Muslims filled the field at Bridgeview’s Toyota Park Monday morning for an unusually somber Eid prayer ceremony in the light of heightened hostilities between Israel and Gaza. Volunteers collected signatures for the 5,000 postcards brought to the event. They intend to mail them to President Obama over the latest deaths in recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The postcards, which 10 chapters of the American Muslims for Palestine across the country distributed Monday, demand that the White House intervene in the fighting...

(Language warning) A Taliban fighter caught by U.S troops planting an IED in Afghanistan. Shortly after planting it, he accidentally steps on it.