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In other words, the logic of the policy is that it punishes people who don’t commit acts of terror. Terrorists want to die, so they aren’t deterred. Israel targets their loved ones, who would suffer more acutely, in the hope that this “price” will intimidate the would-be perpetrator. That is the logic of hostage taking, and of terrorism.

sure enough, West Bank settlers set ablaze a home in a village near Ramallah early Sunday morning, in yet another “price tag” attack. But that, of course, was an isolated incident; any attempt to link such lone-wolf terrorists to Israeli policy would be loudly denounced as guilt by association, or an outright anti-Semitic blood libel.

“I suspect that Chérif Kouachi did engage AQAP members in Yemen, but that he was not fully brought into the organization,

The statement by the Qaeda branch in Yemen called the Kouachi brothers, who were shot to death by police on Friday, “two heroes of Islam.” But it referred to the actions of Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a police officer the day of the assault on Charlie Hebdo and was shot to death by police after holding hostages in a kosher supermarket, as a coincidence and did not take responsibility for them.

Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.

French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."

Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.

"The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.

The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.

Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.

A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.

"We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.

The Iraqi government and much of its military officer corps are mostly made up of Shi’a Muslims, whereas much of the areas ISIS has retained in Iraq are predominantly Sunni

the Iraqi military forces are often operating in areas where the local population may be more willing to tolerate, or even support ISIS

authorities in the U.S. announced they had arrested an Ohio man and ISIS supporter who planned to bomb the U.S. Capitol.

ISIS primarily focused its attention on its regional ambitions prior to the U.S.-led bombing campaig

One of the gunmen in a dual terror attack in Paris in January 2015 claimed that he was part of ISIS, though the other shooters in that attack were linked to an al Qaeda affiliate.

The U.S.-led coalition against ISIS expanded its aggressive bombing campaign against the group into Syria in September 2014 and has bombarded the terror group virtually daily since.

, Western intelligence agencies are concerned about those who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS before coming back home.

The assault began around 7 a.m., when two or three attackers with AK-47 rifles exited at least one vehicle with diplomatic plates and entered the hotel with guns firing, said Olivier Saldago, a spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali.The attack, Saldago said, came as the hotel hosted diplomatic delegations working on a peace process in the landlocked country, a former French colony that has been battling Islamist extremists with the help of U.N. and French forces.The Radisson chain said that as many as 170 people -- 140 guests and 30 employees -- had been there as the attack began.

were killed in the clashes, along with at least nine militants, the defence ministry said.

Correspondents say the attack is a huge security failure because the attackers were able to smuggle weapons into an area supposed to have been made secure by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani, speaking at the conference, called on Pakistan to help restart stalled peace talks with the Taliban.

Witnesses reported that some of the militants took families hostage and used them as human shields. They said they could hear Afghan soldiers calling on the fighters to let the women and children go.

Separately, the Taliban claimed to have captured Khanashin district in southern Helmand province. A local official confirmed the district had fallen.

Militant violence has increased across Afghanistan since the departure of most Nato and US forces last year.

The statement by the Taliban claimed that they had killed up to 80 soldiers. This figure could not be verified.

Afghan Taliban kill dozens at Kandahar airport

The attack continued until one gunman who had out on his own for several hours was killed late on Wednesday.

The election was pushed back from Oct. 11 because of an abortive coup in September by members of the elite presidential guard, in which transitional President Michel Kafando and his prime minister were taken hostage.

That coup cost more than $50 million in lost revenue, trimming growth by 0.3 percentage points.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened?

the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress.

The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington,

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.

Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance,” constitutional reform and U.N.-supervised elections within 18 months

parties will participate in the conference, while excluding those deemed as terrorist organizations 

“terrorists” and “mercenaries,” as well as the sectarian nature of many rebel factions on the ground.

use of shelling and aerial bombardment against civilians, safe and voluntary refugee transfer, and unfettered access for humanitarian agencies to besieged areas of Syria.

“useful” and that he is “looking forward to the active participation of relevant parties in the Geneva talks.”

“From the government’s point of view, they’re not keen on negotiations anyway,” Rabbani said.

The talks face another stumbling block in soaring tensions between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia,

Iran’s Shiite leadership has backed Assad, a member of the Alawite sect that is related to Shia Islam.

Last week, Saudi Arabia executed an influential Shiite cleric, enraging Iran and leading to a cutoff of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

an has similarly called for calm, while diplomatic efforts from Iraq and Oman continue to encourage a reconciliation between the two countries

Previous attempts at jump-starting peace talks have failed because of what was viewed as the government's intransigence regarding rebel participation.

don’t at all see that the proposed date is a realistic one, especially since on the ground there were no confidence-building measures,”

He cited the situation in Madaya, a town with an estimated population of 40,000 located 25 miles northwest of Damascus that has been besieged by pro-government forces since July.

“The issue of Madaya has become a key point. The Syrian cannot go to negotiations while Syrians are dying of hunger and cold,”

the Syrian government said it would allow aid to enter Madaya in the coming week.

In recent days, Madaya has become a media battleground for the warring parties in Syria.

he furor also has affected the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, an ally of the Assad government, which is accused of perpetrating what Madaya residents have described as a nightmare

Hateet also accused rebel fighters bunkered inside Madaya of holding civilians hostage, barring their exit from the town.

“Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.

The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists.

They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program.

In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades.

But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap.

“Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration.

A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.

Then, several weeks ago the Iranians leaked news that they were interested in a swap of their own citizens, which American officials said was an outrageous demand, because they had been indicted or convicted in a truly independent court system.

The result was two parallel races underway — one involving implementing the nuclear deal, the other to get the prisoner swap done while the moment was ripe.

For example, the United States and Iran were struggling late Saturday to define details of what kind of “advanced centrifuges” Iran will be able to develop nearly a decade from now — the kind of definitional difference that can undermine an accord.

The result was that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif veered from the monumental significance of what they were accomplishing — an end to a decade of open hostility — to the minutiae of uranium enrichment.

But Iran has something it desperately needs: Billions in cash, at a time oil shipments have been cut by more than half because of the sanctions, and below $30-a-barrel prices mean huge cuts in national revenue.

senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, though others have used higher estimates. The official said Iran will likely need to keep much of those assets abroad to facilitate international trade.

The Obama administration on Saturday also removed 400 Iranians and others from its sanctions list and took other steps to lift selected restrictions on interactions with Iran

Under the new rules put in place, the United States will no longer sanction foreign individuals or firms for buying oil and gas from Iran. The American trade embargo remains in place, but the government will permit certain limited business activities with Iran, such as selling or purchasing Iranian food and carpets and American commercial aircraft and parts.

It is unclear what will happen after the passing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has protected and often fueled the hardliners — but permitted these talks to go ahead.

While Gulf states cautiously welcomed last year's nuclear deal, they are deeply suspicious of Iran's activities, particularly on the Arabian Peninsula.

The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has taken to Twitter in recent days to criticize Iran and poke fun at his Iranian counterpart. "Don't torch, take over or ransack embassies and consulates. Don't take diplomats hostage. #DiploMaturity101," read one post.

“While it is a relief to see unjustly held Americans returned home to their families," Priebus said, "the Clinton-Obama nuclear agreement gives Iran too much in return for too little."

"Iran's recovery was fixed at a reasonable rate of interest and therefore Iran is unable to pursue a bigger tribunal award against us, preventing US taxpayers from being obligated to a larger amount of money."

Through the sheer force of his malevolence, Trump hopes to bait his foes into engaging on matters far more favorable to him

Trump’s effort took a major hit with the success of Mueller’s team in convicting Manafort. But Cohen’s plea inflicted damage of a higher order because it tied Trump to a crime. This was not a bank shot. It was a direct hit.

Democratic candidates are coming to see an attack on corruption as the theme that will unite their party, appeal to less partisan voters — including at least some in Trump’s 2016 “drain the swamp” constituency — and highlight the broad range of misdeeds by the president, his advisers and his administration.

Chainalysis estimates that last year, companies handling Bitcoin payments accounted for 0.3 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, or $2.4 billion.

practical and legal uses have struggled to outpace illegal or clearly unethical activity.

The most compelling use that Bitcoin fanatics talk about is its value to people in repressive countries that have currencies that are even more volatile than Bitcoin.

Venezuelans bought over $230 million in Bitcoin last year on the most popular platform for sales

In several ways, it’s worse. Paying with Bitcoin requires you to become a speculator on its volatile price for the time you are holding on to token

The list of ways that Bitcoin has proved useful to criminals keeps growing, from the ransom payments on locked-up computer files — or even hostages — to illegal drug sales

The total dark net transactions in 2018, around $620 million, were more than twice the amount that Venezuelans bough

drug purchases account for a much larger proportion of the Bitcoin economy than their proportion of the dollar economy

with Mr. Trump in the White House and feckless Republicans leading Congress, it’s possible that none of this will get done, health care costs will be driven up and millions of children will be left without health insurance.

The deal also advances two Republican health care ideas: giving states more flexibility to make changes to the A.C.A. and letting more people sign up for high-deductible health care policies.

While these compromises provide some hope for the A.C.A., CHIP’s fate, and health care for nine million children, is being held hostage by Republican extremists in the House.

So far, neither Mr. Trump nor Republican leaders in Congress have taken these vital matters very seriously.

“I don’t know a Democrat or a Republican who benefits from chaos.”

Athens’ leftist-led government raised the case with Nato and the United Nations last week, asking both to intervene. Internationalising the case further, Kammenos told his Romanian counterpart during a visit to Bucharest that Greece was seeking support for the “immediate release of Nato, European and Greek servicemen.”

Diplomats in Europe have become increasingly alarmed as tensions have risen markedly not only along the land border between Greece and Turkey but in the Aegean Sea and off the coast of Cyprus, where Ankara has threatened to use military force in a dispute over the ethnically divided island’s right to explore for oil and gas reserves.

At a rally this weekend, Erdoğan surprised supporters by making a hand gesture long associated with the fascist Grey Wolves, an unprecedented move by any leader since the foundation of modern Turkey.