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Bashagha announced an upcoming major offensive by his Turkey-backed Libyan government forces in the country's west to go after militants and human smugglers, and invited the United States to assistThe powerful interior minister of Libya's UN-backed government, seen as a contender for the post of prime minister, has expressed hopes that bringing stability to his war-torn country would become a top priority for the incoming Biden administration. He also announced an upcoming major offensive by his Turkey-backed Libyan government forces in the country's west to go after militants and human smugglers, and invited the United States to assist. “Our hopes...

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen has released the following statement: “We understand that Pakistani authorities are taking steps to ensure that Omar Sheikh remains in custody while the Supreme Court appeal seeking to reinstate his conviction continues. The separate judicial rulings reversing his conviction and ordering his release are an affront to terrorism victims everywhere. We remain grateful for the Pakistani government’s actions to appeal such rulings to ensure that he and his co-defendants are held accountable. If, however, those efforts do not succeed, the United States stands ready to take custody of Omar Sheikh to stand trial here....

Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with atomic weapons, according to a newly released book. Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to Taliban [Images] headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was keen on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the book says. In fact, Mahmood was said to be more close to...

President-elect Joe Biden has made clear in his staffing plans and public remarks that he intends to return America to many of the foreign policy positions championed by his former boss, President Barack Obama. While American mainstream media has largely cheered this – and glowered at President Donald Trump for defending his achievements by making regression more difficult under Biden – many of America’s allies, and some of its foes, around the world are making moves suggesting they expect a full return to the state of global affairs in 2016. The Obama administration’s foreign policy was defined by the tension...

Secretary General. Joined by 34 other countries, the document enshrines the Trump administration’s pro-life diplomacy on the official record of the General Assembly. “The United States strongly supports the dignity of all human beings and protecting life from the moment of conception throughout the lifespan,” Ambassador Kelly Craft wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres transmitting the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Following the letter, the declaration was issued as an official document of the United Nations last week and circulated on December 11, after having been translated into all six official UN languages....

(CNN)In one of Attorney General William Barr's final acts leading the Justice Department, he plans to announce on Monday criminal charges against an alleged bombmaker in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The former Libyan intelligence officer Abu Agila Masud is expected to be charged for his involvement in the bombing, according to three officials familiar briefed on the matter. Monday is the 32nd anniversary of the attack, which killed 270 people, the majority of whom were Americans. The Pan Am Boeing 747 was en route from London to New York. The announcement...

A good read in all fairness to AG Barr

Federal prosecutors are expected to unseal new charges against a bomb-maker linked to the 1988 attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, according to a report. Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, a top bomb-maker for the late Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy, is accused of constructing the explosive that downed the airliner and killed 270 people on board, the Wall Street Journal said. Masud is being held by Libyan authorities.

Israeli Settlements Minister Tzachi Hanegbi warns that a Biden presidency could ignite war in the Middle East, while Egypt fears Biden would aid the resurgence of Islamists in the region. Hanegbi pointed out that Biden has indicated he will resurrect America’s nuclear agreement with Iran which was cancelled by the Trump administration. For Israel, this would represent an existential threat to national security and drastically increase the chances of war with Tehran. “If Biden stays with that policy, there will, in the end, be a violent confrontation between Israel and Iran,” said Hanegbi. Meanwhile, other Middle Eastern countries such as...

The remains of a Ghanaian Christian beheaded by the Islamic State terrorist group on a Libyan beach in an execution video in 2015 has finally been laid to rest in Egypt. Cairo-based journalist Farid Y. Farid reported on Sept. 29 that the body of Matthew Ayariga was finally laid to rest alongside the 20 Coptic Christians who were beheaded beside him on a beach in Sirte, Libya, in a video released by the jihadi death cult in February 2015. “His remains finally arrived today to #Egypt to be laid to rest, w/his Coptic brothers, after 5+yrs of his body not...

Dictator Muammar Gaddafi (several alternate transliterations are familiar, such as Qaddafi and Gadhafi) was killed by his captors during the Libyan civil war on this date in 2011 — an act very much on the extrajudicial and summary side of the foggy borderlands defining an “execution”. Libya’s despot since ejecting the British-supported King Idris way back in 1969, the wily colonel steered his state for 40-odd years; his blend of pan-Arabism, Islamic socialism, pan-Africanism, and direct democracy is known as the Third International Theory and expounded in Gaddafi’s own manual of political theory, The Green Book — which became required...

Paris (AFP) — France’s largest employers’ federation on Monday urged companies to “resist the blackmail” over a product boycott by Arab countries as a backlash widens over Paris’s hardened stance against radical Islam. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to take the fight to Islamic radicals after the October 16 beheading of a history teacher who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed to pupils in a class discussion on free speech. But his comments triggered protests in Muslim-majority countries at the weekend, with people burning pictures of Macron in Syria and setting fire to French flags in the Libyan...

The electronic warfare system is known as “Belladonna”, a poisonous plant that gets its name from Renaissance women who used its extract for tinctures to dilate the pupils of their eyes, ostensibly to make them more attractive. While Belladonna translates to “beautiful woman” in English, in Russian it has a second meaning: it is the name of a Russian electronic jamming system now credited with knocking out at least nine Turkish Bayraktar armed drones used by Azerbaijan to target Armenia. If true – and no one has denied it – the system is now operating around the sensitive Russian military...

As forces mass in Europe, the biggest stumbling block to EuropeÂ’s future strategic independence as well as American grand strategy is once again Germany. North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies Turkey and Greece are embroiled in a dispute over Turkish oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean, and Greece is backed by the French navy. After the French military conducted training exercises with Greek forces in the region on Thursday, Turkey warned France to retreat. Within a day, three things happened in rapid succession.First, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a treaty to relocate troops out of Germany to...

The power shift in the Middle East over the past several years has reshaped the political challenges facing several of its constituent countries, and has led them to consider a possible expansion of their framework of relations. Considering Turkey’s repeated interventions in the affairs of more than one state and the potential threat its ambitions pose to the region’s future, the strategic interests of Israel and many Arab countries—especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia—necessitate a strengthening of relations among countries that can offset Ankara’s aggression. Advertisement Greece is perhaps uniquely suited to assist in this cooperation. Jerusalem boosted its ties...

More than a dozen civilians, including women and children, have been killed in Egypt's restive northern Sinai Peninsula over the past two weeks from explosive devices laid down in their homes by terrorists... Islamic State members attacked several villages in the town of Bir al-Abd in July, forcing people to flee their homes.... The ISIS members, however, had laid booby traps in several houses that killed at least 14 people, including six from the same family ... At least 10 others have been wounded since Oct. 12... The tribes of North Sinai have been heavily targeted by terrorists who view...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: ISIS was so successful in 2014 in part because President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan of Turkey is a vocal supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Any distance ErdoÄŸan has placed between himself and ISIS is attributable to pressure from Russia, the US, and Europe, not to his rejection of the groupÂ’s Islamist ideology. In view of TurkeyÂ’s increasingly divisive and destabilizing influence in the Middle East, the regionÂ’s biggest concern for the West could be President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸanÂ’s burgeoning Islamist tendencies. In order to understand the Turkish role in the threat of ISIS, borne from the Muslim Brotherhood, it...

Welcome to the weekend Poland's constitutional court rules Thursday that abortions are illegal in case of "fetal deformity" leaving only three legal reasons for abortion in Poland rape, incest of the life of the mother... When it comes to the issue of healthcare in the USA what you need to know is that government involvement in healthcare is the root of the evil of its high cost... Newsdump Update-Ceasefire Agreed In Libya Conflict Newsdump Update-Belarus Opposition Deadline Tomorrow-Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo Talks By Phone With Belarus Ruler Alexander Lukashenko-Warning To Americans In Belarus... Newsdump Update: France Islam Terrorism Turkey...

A poster at a shop in Madinah announces its boycott of all Turkish products. RIYADH/JEDDAH: The popular campaign boycotting Turkish products in Saudi Arabia has gained further momentum over the past few days, attracting the support of commentators and businesses. “Turkish political mess-ups and interference in countries of the Middle East is the real reason behind this popular boycott of Turkish products,” said Dr. Hamdan Al-Shehri, a political analyst and international relations scholar. “Turkish President Erdogan changed his previous policy of minimizing Turkish problems and instead exported it to the outside. Turkey has been threatening the region just as Iran...

Turkey has “activated” a Russian-made S-400 anti-aircraft defense system to track F-16 fighter jets flown by several other NATO members, U.S. lawmakers and analysts suspect. “The whole problem with having the S-400 integrated is in order to do that, you have to betray some of the codes and some of the, basically, NATO technology to the Russians,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin said. “And it appears that that's what they've done.” Western officials have eyed Turkey’s turn to Russian arms dealers with alarm in recent years, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defied the threat of U.S. sanctions to...