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OXFORD, England (AP) — Humanity has only two years left “to save the world” by making dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift, the head of the United Nations climate agency said. With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world's populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he...

Three months ago, speaking to citizens rocked by a horrific day of attacks by Hamas, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a promise. “The IDF will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’s capabilities,” Netanyahu said. “We will destroy them.” Now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is shifting to a new phase of its war on Hamas in Gaza – and there are signs its objectives are changing too. “The record is not very friendly to military campaigns seeking to eradicate political military movement that are deeply rooted,” Bilal Y. Saab, an associate fellow in the Middle East and...

LONDON - When U.S. President Joe Biden flies to Europe this week, he will find his hosts welcoming but wary. His predecessor Donald Trump may be gone, but he leaves a long shadow. Biden’s first foreign trip as president starts Wednesday and includes a gathering of the Group of Seven wealthy nations by the seaside in southwest England, a NATO summit, a meeting with European Union chiefs, and then a tete-a-tete in Geneva with his Russian counterpart and adversary, Vladimir Putin. For most of America’s allies, Biden is a relief. Trump often sowed chaos, accusing the NATO military alliance of...

One hope for Yemenis is that the international fallout from the death of the Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, which has damaged Prince Mohammed’s international standing, might force him to relent in his unyielding prosecution of the war. Peter Salisbury, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, said that was unlikely. “I think the Saudis have learned what they can get away with in Yemen — that western tolerance for pretty bad behavior is quite high,” he said. “If the Khashoggi murder tells us anything, it’s just how reluctant people are to rein the Saudis in.”

Chatham House, the London foreign-affairs think tank, has given its seal of respectability to the claim that Britain's participation in the liberation of Iraq allowed al Qaeda to transform a bunch of ordinary Muslim youths into the suicide-killers of July 7. ...[I]t is not clear how anyone could know that the suicide-killers were solely motivated by Britain's role in Iraq. The two claims of responsibility for the operation cite a variety of reasons, making it clear that the attack on Britain was part of a broader campaign against the "infidel" West. And how could Islamist suicide-bombers be concerned only about...

It has been known for some time now that residents of the United Kingdom have gradually come to the opinion that participating in the War On Iraq had led to a higher risk for terrorist attacks in their home country. An official report (the first of a series) from the Chatham House think tank confirms these fears. I make no secret of the fact that I always was a firm opponent of that war, and I myself see in the present report the reflection of one of the dreadful consequences of that invasion. Your comments please.