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Report Slams US Troop Pullout from Syria By Jeff Seldin August 6, 2019 U.S. plans to keep just a residual force in Syria to ensure the enduring defeat of the Islamic State may be on the verge of backfiring, with some military officials warning the strategy is giving the terror group new life. The doubts, raised in a Defense Department Inspector General report released Tuesday, come as Washington has struggled to secure additional on-the-ground help in Syria from allies and amid renewed warnings that while IS may have lost control of its self-declared caliphate, the group's fighters are far from...

The Islamic State terror group continues to pose a real and present danger, according to the latest United Nations six-month report on jihadist activities. Islamic State (ISIS) leadership “aims to adapt, survive and consolidate in the core area and to establish sleeper cells at the local level in preparation for eventual resurgence, while using propaganda to maintain the group’s reputation as the leading global terrorist brand – the ‘virtual caliphate,’” the report declares. “When it has the time and space to reinvest in an external operations capability, ISIL will direct and facilitate international attacks in addition to the ISIL-inspired attacks...

Ramón Saúl Sánchez, a Cuban pro-democracy leader who has been active in the struggle against communism for 50 years, recently received notice that the U.S. government denied his request for permanent residence in the country. If returned to the island, “they will execute me or put me in prison for the rest of my life,” Sánchez told Breitbart News. Sánchez has been in the United States for 52 years. For decades, he has advocated for peaceful acts of resistance against the Castro regime – from hunger strikes to highway sit-ins to the iconic flotillas of the Democracy Movement, Sánchez’s organization,...

United States carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the power sector and the broader economy have declined 61 percent between 2006 and 2014, mainly from "switching from coal-to-gas-powered generation," according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Second Installment of the Quadrennial Energy Review, January 2017.  These environmentally sound numbers from higher use of natural gas can also be translated globally to help with pollution in countries such as China, India, and the entire continent of Africa. The U.S. now uses natural gas converted to liquid natural gas (LNG) from shale deposits in states such as Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania to...

SYDNEY, Australia — Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Saturday he hoped to soon place ground-launched, intermediate-range missiles in Asia, a day after the United States pulled itself from a Cold War era arms control pact. “Yes, I would like to,” Esper told reporters traveling with him to Sydney when asked whether he was considering deploying such missiles in Asia. “I would prefer [in] months, I just don’t have the latest state of play on timelines for either a cruise missile or long-range missile ... but these things tend to take longer than you expect.”

The US has formally withdrawn from a key nuclear treaty with Russia, raising fears of a new arms race. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. It banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km (310-3,400 miles). But earlier this year the US and Nato accused Russia of violating the pact by deploying a new type of cruise missile, which Moscow has denied. The Americans said they had evidence that Russia had deployed a number of 9M729 missiles - known to Nato as SSC-8. This accusation...

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday accused the United States of influencing the increasingly violent pro-democracy protests that have rocked Hong Kong for two months. "As you all know, they are somehow the work of the US," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a press conference in Beijing. Hua added that China would "never allow any foreign forces" to interfere in the semi-autonomous city, and warned that "those who play (with) fire will only get themselves burned." The comments are one of the most direct accusations Beijing has so far made of US interference in Hong Kong politics, and...

Trump told reporters Thursday that he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin about ways to improve trade and wildfires blazing in Siberia. He made no mention of either the new sanctions or whether they came up during the phone call. President Donald Trump slapped new sanctions on Russia for its poisoning of an ex-spy in the United Kingdom in 2018...Trump, who signed the executive order Thursday, has been reluctant to impose sanctions against Russia in his efforts to improve relations between Washington and Moscow.

As China considers ways to retaliate against President Trump’s mounting tariffs, it has increasingly acknowledged that it must first address its main obstacle to punching back: its own slumping economy. Chinese officials have vowed to respond with measures of their own if Mr. Trump follows through on his threat to put 10 percent tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese imports a year. If Mr. Trump enacts the tariffs next month, as he said he would do on Thursday, the costs would rise for nearly everything China ships to the United States, from shoes to car parts to the latest gadgets....

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - The United States formally withdrew from a landmark nuclear missile pact with Russia on Friday after determining that Moscow was in violation of the treaty, something the Kremlin has repeatedly denied. Washington signalled it would pull out of the arms control treaty six months ago unless Moscow stuck to the accord. Russia called the move a ploy to exit a pact the United States wanted to leave anyway in order to develop new missiles. The 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was negotiated by then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A historic arms-control treaty signed three decades ago by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was scrapped after President Trump decided to withdraw Friday. The move to scrap the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty comes amid the administration’s assessment that Russia was in “material breach of the treaty” and made no effort to “come back into compliance” with the agreement, a senior White House official said. Russia was given a six-month period, in accordance with the treaty, as a “final opportunity to come back into compliance” with the agreement, but the government headed by President Vladimir Putin “has...

Iran’s focus on building a powerful ballistic missile arsenal, which the Americans, Saudis and Israelis, among others, see as a major threat, has its origins in the 1980-88 war with Iraq in which major cities were subjected to merciless missile and air strikes in which thousands of civilians were killed or wounded. The so-called War of the Cities involved five periods of systematic and intense bombardments with missiles, aircraft and even long-range artillery from February 1984, when Saddam Hussein ordered indiscriminate attacks on 11 Iranian cities, through February 1987. The objective was to inflict large civilian casualties to demoralise the...

Five years on, Mikael Skillt still doesn't know exactly what made him leave his construction job and his girlfriend to fight in the war in Ukraine. “I’ve done tons of soul-searching, and the more I think about it, the less I know why I came,” the 43-year-old told VICE News. But an undeniable part of the draw was that Ukrainian ultranationalists, many with barely disguised neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, had been a driving force in the revolution. Skillt, at the time a notorious Swedish neo-Nazi with a 20-year history in the extreme-right scene, felt compelled to join their fight....

RUSH: We’re gonna be having a little bit more exploration today on Tulsi Gabbard versus Kamala Harris. But just a little teaser here. The state of California has begun to hide the official record of Kamala Harris as attorney general so people cannot go look it up and find out that Tulsi Gabbard is right. Now, folks, these are people that have been turning over every stone and rock looking for mythical information that Trump cheated with Russia. Now the same people demanding all of this transparency are hiding and covering up the official record of Kamala Harris because, despite...

16:13 01.08.2019(updated 16:52 01.08.2019) Get short URL31698 The strike comes after Damascus stated last Wednesday that Israel had struck a Syrian army base in Tel Al-Hara in the Golan Heights and in Quneitra. An Israeli missile has hit the western province of Quneitra in Syria, near the Golan Heights, Syrian state media reported Thursday. The village of Tal Braiqa was the target in the strikes, according to SANA. There is no official information about casualties at the moment. The Israel Defence Forces have previously admitted to carrying out "hundreds" of airstrikes against Syria in recent years, stressing, however, that the...

A local news bureau reported “shock” in the German city of Stuttgart after a 36-year-old man was hacked to death with what appeared to be a katana-type sword in the middle of the street on Wednesday afternoon. The attack took place in front of dozens of witnesses and was filmed by passers-by on mobile phones from multiple angles, and saw a man, a 36-year old German resident of Kazakhstan origin, lying on the floor and being repeatedly hacked at and stabbed with a sword, reports German newspaper Bild.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) agreed with a radio host's description of Israel's treatment of Palestinians as "criminal" during an interview Tuesday and suggested Palestinians had no recourse but violence. On his hip-hop program "Ebro in the Morning," interviewer Ebro Darden said there was a collection of "corrupt" governments in Israel, the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, "all working in concert," and referred to White House policy adviser Stephen Miller as a white supremacist. "How do you have white supremacist Jews?" he asked. "How do you have people like Stephen Miller? How do you have these individuals who are...

Israeli warplanes bombed Iranian-linked targets in Iraq and Syria in July, the Arabic-language Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported Tuesday, quoting Western diplomatic sources. The sources told the London-based newspaper that on July 19, Israel carried out an attack on the base of an Iran-linked paramilitary group in the northern Salahuddin province of Iraq. Reports initially said that the attack was carried out by a drone and and led to the deaths of an unconfirmed number of Iranian Revolutionary Guard fighters. According to the Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya, the base housed Iranian-made ballistic missiles hidden in food refrigeration trucks. Israeli officials, including...

President Donald Trump’s new pick to lead the country’s vast intelligence apparatus fell into favor with the White House as a longtime, vocal critic of the Russia investigation and the officials who launched it. But John Ratcliffe, the congressman Trump has tapped to fight the “deep state” from within, has worked closely with one of the men Russian President Vladimir Putin wants most to see in prison: Bill Browder, an American-born businessman who has been on a decade-long campaign to expose Russian corruption. Ratcliffe was one of our lawyers at Ashcroft dealing with the fallout from Magnitsky,” Browder told POLITICO...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Maxim Akimov on Monday called a draft law on limiting foreign ownership in major Russian information technology companies to 20% "destructive". "The competitiveness of the Russian economy is largely determined by the competitiveness of our companies," Akimov said in a statement. "And this draft bill undermines stability and competitiveness of the companies, giving all tech market players wrong signals." The draft bill was submitted to the State Duma on Friday. Shares in Yandex, known as Russia's Google, were up 3.6% in New York after Akimov's statement.