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The main strategic result of the ongoing Russian military operation in Syria is loss of the US monopoly on the recourse to force. Now, the US is lossing the leadership in the Middle East region. The success of the alternative anti-ISIS coalition will mean that the US could lose the leadership in a great part of the world, in Eurasia.

The US is pushed to answer on this challenge through political, military and media means. This is why Washington is preparing a military operation of Peshmerga and People’s Protection Units (YPG) to take control of Raqqa. The US military will coordinate this offensive and provide air support.

Indeed, this situation looks as a background of the future war. Nonetheless, the near-war situation can’t be stable. At the moment, the US and Russia stay on different sides of the trench. But, the rapidly changing situation could lead to occurrence of the shotgun marriage between Russia and the US.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he's sorry for "mistakes" made in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he doesn't regret bringing down dictator Saddam Hussein.

"I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong

Blair acknowledged to Zakaria that there are "elements of truth" in the view that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the principle cause of the rise of ISIS.

Islamophobic attacks are at an all-time high.

"There's a definite gender issue here at work when it comes to anti-Muslim hate." He says that 80 percent of the attacks after Paris were on women, and that the reasons for this are partly practical. "There's a visibility factor. It's easy to identify Muslim women who dress in Islamic dress. And also there's the fact that they are less likely to fight back."

housands gathered for a moving memorial service in Paris on Sunday, as a city and a nation paused to remember the scores of lives lost in a spate of terror attacks last year

honor the 17 victims of the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office and a Jewish supermarket last January, as well as the 130 victims of the coordinated massacre in November.

has become an informal memorial and a rallying point for free speech and democratic values after the attacks

urged Americans in his final State of the Union address to reject the politics of tribalism and fear that have rocked the campaign to find his successor and to build a "clear-eyed, big-hearted" and "optimistic" nation.

did not name Republican 2016 candidates

imperiled by a political system festering in malice, gridlock and in the grip of the rich and the powerful

“We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he vowed.

Greater Middle East and periodically spilling into the outside world.

The Soviet Union spent all of the 1980s attempting to pacify Afghanistan and succeeded only in killing a million or so Afghans while creating an incubator for Islamic radicalism.

“Trump is a fascist,”

“We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, declares to the House of Commons,

That was George Orwell, in 1944. He had heard the epithet “fascist” applied, he said, to fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, “astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

A suicide bomber struck the home of an important tribal elder in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Sunday morning, killing at least 13 people, a government official said.

Najeebullah Kamawal, head of the Nangarhar public health directorate, said that at least 14 civilians had been wounded and that three of them were in critical condition

Jalalabad, about 75 miles east of Kabul, is the capital of Nangarhar, a province bordering Pakistan that has become increasingly violent since the departure of American and NATO combat troops at the end of 2014.

The prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Iran capped 14 months of secret diplomacy and talks between Washington and Tehran as the U.S. and world powers negotiated the pact to curb Iran's nuclear program

The secret talks were led by Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy tapped by President Barack Obama to coordinate the global fight against ISIS, the officials said.

The names of the Iranians have not yet been released, the officials said, adding that the four Americans had not left Iran as of late Saturday morning.

GOP governors and lawmakers were quick to announce they wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into their states and are appealing for stronger control of U.S. borders.

people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism," Obama said in Antalya, Turkey, at a meeting of the G20. "It is very important ... that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism."

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee similarly heaped pressure on Ryan, saying in a statement: "Speaker Ryan

Spectres are haunting Earth—the spectres of anti-communism. From Wahhabism to neoliberalism, overproduction to debt, the disastrous “war on terror” to the genocide of the welfare state, and from cold war game theory to cybernetics’ networked offspring, the internet—these are all anti-communist projects that came back to haunt us. In this apocalyptic climate, where CO2, ISIS and HFT (High Frequency Trading) stand for the self-annihilation of this civilization on a cultural, economic, political and biological level, we propose The Kids Want Communism. This ongoing clandestine and public series of events marks ninety-nine years to the October Revolution.

“Communism” might sound like an irrelevant term for many people today, but more than any other word in our political vocabulary, communism is the radical negation of the current regime which celebrates exploitation and inequality. It is a cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989–91. This cosmos includes many communisms; an epic reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long history of anti-Fascist resistance, egalitarian mysticism, the dialectic abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics, the uncharted, un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by capitalism, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”

. Something about the Trump style appeals to an Israeli sense of machismo, an appreciation for direct, gut-level expressions of toughness, such a contrast from the more analytical Obama.

The problem for Israel today, though, goes beyond the surprise. If Obama was too cautious for many Israelis, Trump has now shown them how his approach to foreign policy—impulsive, isolationist, transactional, turning on a dime with no alternative in place—can work against their interests. And Netanyahu—who praised Trump in almost messianic terms and who knows how poorly he responds to criticism—now has few tools at his disposal to object to this policy. Israelis can only shake their heads at the absence of any strategy as they survey the regional fallout.

The first victims of Erdogan’s empowerment, of course, will not be Israelis. They will be Kurds. Kurdish fighters—who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces (including, it must be acknowledged, some affiliated with the anti-Turkish terrorist group the PKK)—have led the battle on the ground against ISIS, liberating city after city in northeastern Syria. With no U.S. troops to coordinate with and protect them, they will be left to Erdogan’s tender mercies.

The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and between Tolkienists like myself and the Randians a great gulf is often fixed.

even if libertarianism seems an insufficient philosophy of human flourishing, its defense of individuals and markets can be a crucial practical corrective to all manner of liberal and conservative mistakes

Just a little while ago journalists were talking about a “libertarian moment” in American politics, with Rand Paul as its avatar

Immigrants have prized American citizenship because, among other things, it accords their U.S.-born children the same rights and opportunities as other native-born Americans. It also offers the protection of the rule of law that their home countries sometimes lack. Muthana’s case illustrates how illusory those protections could be.

Bush’s administration was criticized for holding José Padilla, an American citizen, as an enemy combatant for three and a half years without trial

Obama was condemned over the mass surveillance of citizens, and excoriated for the drone strike in 2011 that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical preacher. His teenage son, also an American citizen, was killed two weeks later in another strike.

At a recent security conference in Munich, Senator James Risch cautioned that a “very brief” conflict “of biblical proportions” could erupt between the United States and North Korea, leaving in its wake “mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen.” He then promptly left his stunned audience to catch a flight. This week, back in Washington, D.C., the Idaho Republican explained the warning. He expressed some hope that economic sanctions and other pressure will make North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rethink his pursuit of nuclear weapons. But if that doesn’t happen, he suggested, the nuclear threat from North Korea is so exceptional that the Trump administration could feel obligated to embark on an all-out war.

“The president of the United States has said over and over again that he does not telegraph what and when and how he is going to do something,” he continued. “He proved it once in Syria, in response to [President] Assad using chemical weapons against his people, and he proved it a second time in Afghanistan when he delivered” the “mother of all bombs” against ISIS targets. “Both of those times that he pulled the trigger were very surgical, very direct, accomplished exactly what they were supposed to accomplish.”

Isn’t the possibility of miscalculation a good argument for talking to the North Koreans, if only to handle crises? “Of course it is,” Risch said. “Civilized people would do that, wouldn’t they?” But North Korea’s “recklessness” and “maliciousness” mean that its leaders are “entirely different than the civilized people we’re dealing with who are nuclear powers,” he said.

When you consider the plain meaning of the law, and the actions Haspel engaged in, it is impossible to conclude anything but that Haspel committed war crimes of the gravest kind and then helped destroy the evidence of them. There is no defense under the law in which a war criminal can claim that he or she was merely following orders.

There are equally no extenuating circumstances that can ever justify torture, according to the U.N. Convention signed by Ronald Reagan no less, in 1984: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Nor is it possible for any human being to read what was done to these prisoners without concluding that this was torture. If an American were captured by ISIS, was waterboarded 83 times, hung from the ceiling by his wrists, locked into a tiny box for days, and turned into a shell of a human being, would any American deny that he was tortured? The question answers itself.

Meanwhile, the prime minister has to persuade EU leaders that her country is not turning its back on them; that it offers something in return for favourable exit terms.

The best economic argument that the remain campaign failed to communicate to voters was that no EU satellite arrangement combining market access and influence over the rules could rival the one we already have as full members.

May’s negotiations have to go well beyond the list of current benefits that Britain might salvage. She needs a broader agenda to discuss what we have to offer as a strategic partner to the European project.

According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook.

we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics.

American destroyer struck three sites in Yemen on Thursday

USS Mason

a minority Shia group that has taken control of swathes of Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa