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Gol-e-Zard Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago... It appears that the empire became increasingly dependent on the productivity of the northern lands and used the grains sourced from this region to feed the army and redistribute the food supplies to key supporters....

Good morning. The latest from President Trump on the border wall funding talks is that there was a "productive meeting" between his representatives led by Vice-President Mike Pence and the representatives of the Congressional Democrats...... An 18-year old Saudi Arabian woman is holed up in a hotel room at the airport in Bangkok, Thailand resisting efforts to force her back to Kuwait where she says she will be forced back to Saudi Arabia..... The Google translation reads: "Macron you're screwed, chicks are in the street" That was part of the banner held by hundreds of women yellow vests protesters on...

The substantial request for military support included air raids, logistics and transportation so Turkish forces could finish off the remaining fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in Syria, senior US officials were quoted as saying by the WSJ on Friday. "The Turkish requests are so extensive that, if fully met, the American military might be deepening its involvement in Syria instead of reducing it," the newspaper reported. The unidentified American officials told the Journal there was little chance Washington would agree to Ankara's requests in full. US President Donald Trump announced...

The latest developments in the U.S. withdrawal from Syria and other recent news from Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

BEIRUT — Kurdish forces in Syria said Sunday that they had captured two American citizens hiding out in the country’s final Islamic State stronghold. In a statement, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, identified the detainees as Warren Christopher Clark, 34, and Zaid Abed al-Hamid, 35. It said the pair had been captured alongside three others suspected of being foreign recruits in the extremist group. Law enforcement agencies say several dozen Americans joined the Islamic State in its once-sweeping self-proclaimed caliphate across Syria and Iraq. The SDF did not provide additional information about the two Americans it detained, but according...

President Donald Trump will not withdraw American troops from northern Syria until the Turkish government guarantees it won’t then attack Syrian Kurdish forces that have been critical allies in the fight against ISIS, national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday. Bolton said a commitment from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that protects the Kurds after American forces exit is something Trump is demanding, and that it’s just one of several conditions that have to be met before U.S. troops leave. “There are objectives that we want to accomplish that condition the withdrawal,” Bolton said. He spoke to reporters traveling with...

In May 2018, the Russian military revealed it had combat-tested its Uran-9 robot tank in Syria. The diminutive remote-control tank is noted for its formidable gun and missile armament. However, just a month later Defense Blog reported that Senior Research Officer Andrei Anisimov told a conference at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg that the Uran-9’s performance in Syria revealed that “modern Russian combat Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are not able to perform the assigned tasks in the classical types of combat operations.” He concluded it would be ten to fifteen more years before UGVs were ready for such...

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton has warned the Syrian government it should not see the impending U.S. military withdrawal from the country as an invitation to use chemical weapons. U.S. President Donald Trump said in December that U.S. troops had succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State militants and were no longer needed in the country. The announcement, which took officials in Washington and allies abroad by surprise, contributed to Jim Mattis’ decision to resign as U.S. defense secretary and prompted concern that Islamic State could stage a comeback.

Big JW Victory: California and Los Angeles County to Remove 1.5 Million Inactive Voters from Voter Rolls Trump’s HUD Keeps Obama’s Funding for Radical Leftist Groups The Obama-Clinton Administration Behind Syria Debacle Big JW Victory: California and Los Angeles County to Remove 1.5 Million Inactive Voters from Voter Rolls Good news for the voters in California and across the country. We have signed a settlement agreement with the State of California and the County of Los Angeles under which they will begin the process of removing from their voter registration rolls as many as 1.5 million inactive registered names...

In Paris today Act 8 of the Yellow Vests protests coming out of the holiday period with renewed vigor..... Another Friday in Sudan meant another day of protests against that country's government..... A protest set for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's home in Jerusalem this evening..... 3 dead and 4 wounded in a shooting incident at a bowling alley in Torrance, California, near Los Angeles..... More meeting and talking at the White House today..... There is no timeline for the US withdrawal from Syria. That's what the US State Department is saying....

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate. The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia's elections, Turkey's Islamist AKP Party purged the...

Yellow Vests protester Eric Drouet says he attempted to stage a protest in Paris Wednesday night to: "show the French that we are not free"..... In Washington the political change with a new session of Congress Thursday...... Seven are dead and eight injured, some critically, after a fiery accident on I-75 near Gainesville, Florida Thursday..... A legendary Chicago machine politician is under federal indictment for attempted extortion...... A group of 11 men are being tried in Saudi Arabia for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi..... Israel's Attorney General Avechai Mandelblit says: "I an working with the Chief Prosecutor and spend...

"What the United States fears the most is taking casualties," said Rear Admiral Lou Yuan...Lou’s comments reflect a growing belief in China that the United States has lost its stomach for war,...The Chinese believe that "Americans have gone soft...at the first sign of genuine trouble they will cut and run,"

The Syrian regime said Wednesday hundreds of Kurdish fighters had withdrawn from Manbij near the border with Turkey... "The information (we have) indicates that nearly 400 Kurdish fighters have left Manbij so far." The People's Protection Units (YPG), the main Kurdish militia in Syria, last week invited regime forces to deploy to the key city following a shock announcement that American troops would leave the country.

President Donald Trump late last week told the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria that he could have several months to pull 2,000 troops out of Syria, backtracking on his initial order for a full and rapid withdrawal within 30 days, The New York Times reports. The report came after Trump tweeted that “we’re slowly sending out troops back home.” U.S. officials told the Times the conversation between Trump and Lt. Gen. Paul J. LaCamera took place during the president’s surprise trip to Iraq.

Turkey and Russia have reached agreement on the next steps, military, humanitarian and otherwise in Syria. But the Turkish government is frustrated with the pace of the US military withdrawal from Syria..... Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a major supporter of jihadist groups opposing the Syrian government......says he's reassured after speaking with President Trump about the withdrawal of US forces from Syria... Russia's FSB security agency says an American citizen has been detained while on a spy mission..... A South Korea newspaper reports a conciliatory message from North Korea's ruler to President Trump.....

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sunday that withdrawing US troops from Syria could directly result in the deaths of Kurdish people there and that he plans to make a case to President Donald Trump today to reconsider his plans. "There are three things important for this country. Number one, make sure that ISIS never comes back in Syria," Graham said to CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union." "We need to keep our troops there. They're inside the ten-yard line in defeating ISIS, but we're not there yet. If we leave now, the Kurds are going to get...

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Syrian President Bashar Assad authorized Iraqi forces on Sunday to attack the Islamic State group inside Syria without waiting for permission from authorities in Damascus, the state news agency SANA said, as the two allies coordinate their fight against extremists ahead of a planned U.S. withdrawal from Syria. ... On Saturday Assad received a letter from Iraq’s Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi calling for both countries’ coordination in “fighting terrorism.” ... In Tehran, Iran and Syria signed Sunday a long-term strategic and economic agreement as the war winds down in Syria where Iran and Russia were the main...

On its face, Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act toward Israel. But it isn’t. On its face, President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act towards Israel. But it isn’t. Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria is of a piece with outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s address on Tuesday to the UN Security Council regarding the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Both statements reflect the depths of the administration’s friendship and support for the State...

Since President Donald Trump’s directive to withdraw U.S. ground forces from Syria, the foreign policy elite keep levying complaints. While the people opposing Trump’s Syria decision may be loud, that doesn’t make them right. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the decision “a mistake,” while Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham used increasingly creative language to get the president’s attention by relentlessly tweeting about how “ecstatic” the Iranians must be. Indeed, with every passing hour, establishment politicians and conventional foreign policy thinkers are deploying increasingly desperate arguments to make their case about why American boots still need to be on the ground in...