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On some issues, General Mattis appeared to take a starker view of the dangers faced by the United States than Mr. Trump

he asserted that the United States needed to maintain its influence there long after Mosul was captured from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “Our principal interest in Iraq is to ensure that it does not become a rump state of the regime in Tehran,”

he described the fighting as a major threat to American national security interests, offering a more alarming view of the crisis than the Obama administration and, at times, than Mr. Trump.

“The brutal civil war in Syria has destabilized the Middle East, contributed to the destabilization of Europe and threatened allies like Israel, Jordan and Turkey, all while ISIS, Iran and Russia have profited from the chaos

“Challenges posed by Russia include alarming messages from Moscow regarding the use of nuclear weapons; treaty violations; the use of hybrid warfare tactics to destabilize other countries; and involvement in hacking and information warfare,”

Mr. Trump said during the campaign that it might be necessary to “take out” terrorists’ families to win the war against the Islamic State. General Mattis categorically opposes such an approach. “The killing of noncombatants in a war against a nonstate enemy violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions,” he wrote.

he opposed military exchanges or security cooperation with Raúl Castro’s Cuba.

“We all remember what it felt like on 9/11 and 9/12,” he wrote. “We should do what is necessary to prevent such an attack from occurring again.”

General Mattis said he saw Iran as an increasing threat. “Iranian malign influence in the region is growing,”

He said the alliance “enormously” benefits American security. “The alliance must harness renewed political will to confront and walk back aggressive Russian actions,”

“Legal questions aside, it is my view that such actions would be self-defeating and a betrayal of our ideals.”

“Having demonstrated 40 years of loyalty to the principle of civilian control and to the U.S. Constitution, I know what to expect from the uniformed leadership,”

“Furthermore, I understand what is required of the civilians tasked with leading our military services.”

The report says Clinton, who is the Democratic presidential front-runner, should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013.

Clinton’s team has spent months casting the State Department inspector general’s office as overly aggressive and working hand in hand with congressional Republicans to cast the former secretary of state in the worst possible light.

It was particularly critical of former secretary of state Colin Powell — who has acknowledged publicly that he used a personal email account to conduct business — concluding that he too failed to follow department policy designed to comply with public-record laws.

For a candidate already struggling to overcome a perception that she is neither honest nor trustworthy, the IG report makes that task significantly harder.

Clinton remains blessed that Republicans are on the verge of nominating Donald Trump, a candidate whose numbers on honesty, trustworthiness and even readiness to lead are worse — and in some cases, far worse — than hers. But Trump’s task of casting her as “Crooked Hillary” just got easier.

they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted.

Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

It is not just that the inspector general found fault with her email practices. The report speaks directly to a wounding perception that Mrs. Clinton is not forthright or transparent.

Mrs. Clinton, through her lawyers, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general as part of the review.

Mrs. Clinton’s allies on Wednesday jumped on the fact that the report also revealed that Colin Powell, the secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and other State Department officials had also exclusively used personal email accounts

Crooked Hillary, crooked Hillary, she’s as crooked as they come,’’ Mr. Trump said at a rally in Anaheim, Calif.

But the Clinton campaign’s new effort to define Mr. Trump as a con man who rips off the little guy for his own gain will be met with the trickle of new developments related to Mrs. Clinton’s private email.

Mrs. Clinton spent much of last summer insisting she did not need to apologize for keeping a private server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. because the practice was “allowed.”

Mrs. Clinton has long contended that voters care more about issues — like equal pay for women, widely available child care, and making college more affordable — than how she handled her emails as secretary of state

“GOP criticism of Pres Obama jumped the shark today when they started saying Benghazi is one of the reasons for what is happening in Crimea,” Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser, wrote on Twitter.

The emerging critique has clearly gotten under the president’s skin as well. Without waiting to be asked, he rebutted the idea that Mr. Putin had gotten the upper hand. “I would also note just the way that some of this has been reported, that there’s a suggestion somehow that the Russian actions have been clever strategically,”

“There is an awkwardness about the United States government trying to lead a response to international outrage to that violation when we’re only a couple of years out from our own near-decade of war in Iraq, which was a war that was, of course, also launched on a trumped-up false pretext.”

“Well, the big difference is, need I say, the tens of thousands of bodies the Bush-Cheney crowd left in their trail.”Mr. Bus

“Back in 2008, when we had a defense budget well over $700 billion and George W. Bush was president, Putin felt no limitation whatsoever on going into Georgia and essentially taking over two separate provinces.”

“The fact is, Mr. Secretary, it was not predicted by our intelligence, and that’s already well known,” he scolded Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, calling it “another massive failure.” Mr. Hagel countered that the United States had been “well aware of the threats.”

But what else can you call an environment where workers are totally controlled by an employer?

They're forced to live in squalor, they are indeed pushed to work in extreme heat, often left without enough water for very long hours and then they go home to cook food in unhygienic conditions, live 8, 10, 12 to a room, and even if they want to leave, if they've just had enough, they can't go because the employer has to sign an exit visa or sign the papers to allow them to work for a better employer."

Britain's Guardian newspaper last week which alleged that thousands of Nepali migrant workers are enduring dire conditions, and that 44 died over the space of nine weeks this summer.

Suresh Man Shrestha, secretary of the Ministry of Labor in Nepal, told CNN that the return of the bodies of migrant laborers to Nepal from overseas already is a daily occurrence.

But it's also important to focus on the fact that currently these activities that are going on, or that have been reported about, are actually illegal under the company laws, (which) very clearly criminalize these actions, and as soon as the government or the relevant authorities take a look at them action is taken

Those from India and Nepal make up the bulk of the estimated 1.2 million migrant workers in Qatar, it says.

Figures attributed to "representatives of the (Nepali) community" support the Qatari figures, indicating that in total 276 Nepalis died in Qatar last year and 151 through September this year. Of the deaths last year, half were put down to "natural causes" and a fifth, or 55, to workplace accidents.

The officials said "roughly 400,000" Nepali migrants are in Qatar.

Some laborers told the paper they were denied access to free drinking water despite the summer heat.

Shrestha gave three reasons for the tragically high death toll among Nepali laborers, who quit the Himalayan kingdom on the promise of better paying jobs to help support their families.

Rights group Human Rights Watch said in February that Qatar "has not delivered on its pledges to improve migrant workers' rights."

"The issues that are being raised are not part of my culture," he said. "We unequivocally are outraged. We definitely do not accept these cultures happening within our society and we are taking action about it."

"The issue is in terms of finding a system of enforcement to enforce these policies. The government has been taking actions towards it (but) this can't happen overnight."

President Jefferson confirmed Chief Justice Marshall’s prediction that he would have to satisfy the terrorist branch of his party. He secretly sought revenge against a man he disliked almost as much as George Washington -- Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson ordered his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, to exhume the records of Hamilton’s era and discover evidence that he was a crook. The UnWashington President was hoping to junk the whole Hamilton financial system, including his bête noir, the Bank of the United States.

the man from Geneva, Switzerland informed the dismayed president he had not found an iota of corruption. Worse, Gallatin’s economist’s head told his Jeffersonian heart that the bank of the United States and its funded debt and thriving stock market were vital to the stability of the republic. The bank, he wearily informed Jefferson, “had been wisely and skillfully managed.”

Particularly tough-minded on the hiring and firing of key staffers and Cabinet members, she often played bad cop to his good cop, forcing difficult decisions that the famously easygoing chief executive was loath to make.

“Reagan knew where he wanted to go,”

“but she had a better sense of what he needed to do to get there.”

One of the 20th century’s most popular presidents, Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because of his ability to deflect almost any controversy or criticism. But his wife was the “flypaper first lady,” as longtime advisor Michael Deaver once quipped, because nearly everything negative stuck to her.

she also became a vocal advocate of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, which Bush opposed despite scientists’ belief that it could lead to cures for incapacitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Her good deeds were barely noticed. She championed the Foster Grandparent Program, a cause she would continue to promote in Washington. She took a special interest in Vietnam veterans, hosting emotional dinners for returning prisoners of war and sitting at the bedsides of young soldiers at the veteran’s hospital in Westwood.

During her husband’s second term in Sacramento, she raised $1 million from Republican donors to build a new governor’s mansion on a scenic site above the American River in nearby Carmichael.

“Virtually everything I did during that first year was misunderstood and ridiculed,” Reagan complained in “My Turn.”

“She was the personnel director of the Reagan operation, so to speak,”

She was widely credited with forcing the departures of several high-level administration figures, including Interior Secretary James Watt, Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler and two national security advisors, Richard V. Allen and William Clark.

The international strategy for post-conflict stabilization differed from that taken in all of NATO's prior military interventions in one important way: No peacekeeping or stabilization forces were deployed after the war -- although many countries, including the United States, sent diplomats to help with the transition from war to peace, Libyans were largely left to fend for themselves. The situation since then has been tumultuous and violent.

The third lesson is that foreign policy decision-makers need to think before they act. This requires a clear-eyed assessment of the potential outcomes of the use of American power to overthrow foreign leaders. "You break it, you own it," Colin Powell famously quipped in reference to Iraq.

Clinton's failure to plan ahead in Libya contrasts with Vice President Joe Biden's sobering assessment for life in the country after Qaddafi. According to the Times, Antony J. Blinken, then Biden's national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, said that the Vice President had expressed concern about what he called "not the day after, but the decade after."

Clinton is long on triumphalism ("we came, we saw, he died" she is reported to have said upon viewing a video of Qaddafi's brutal death), but short on thinking pragmatically about the consequences for Americans and others.

Having publically criticized George W. Bush for failing to plan for a post-war transition in Iraq, Clinton should have known better. Perhaps she does. In a recent town hall hosted by CNN's Chris Cuomo, the Secretary dodged the question about why when it came to Libya she had failed to apply the lessons of Iraq on the need for intelligent and thoughtful post-war planning.

The American President has significant powers in foreign policy-making. Hillary Clinton's decision-making is in line with the flawed foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, repeating the disastrous policies of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz: bomb, invade, overthrow - and then think later, if ever.

Hillary and her advisors may want to take the fight to Syria next. But American voters would do well to heed the lessons of failure and anarchy in Iraq and Libya. They would do well to think hard before signing onto an encore presentation of U.S.-sponsored violence in the name of freedom in the Middle East.

The sailors, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said, “went through hell.

Trump and others said that the only reason Iran cooperated so quickly was that “they get $100 billion during the next short period of time; they don’t want to jeopardize that.”

The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention authorizes coastal states to take “necessary steps” to prevent passage through their territorial waters that “is not innocent,” but so-called “innocent” vessels are exempt from arrest and seizure and subject only to diplomatic complaint and orders to leave

The United States and Iran, however, are among a minority of nations that have never ratified the convention

Through debriefing, the official said, “hopefully [the sailor] will be able to relay the story….This guy may have been doing what he needed to do to release tensions.

According to a senior U.S. defense official, the Iranians could have pilfered some personal information from the captives.

Fadavi also complained of what he called “irresponsible” and provocative behavior by U.S. naval forces in the region after the capture. He said that while the captured sailors accepted their predicament calmly,

The sailors were en route to Kuwait from Bahrain in the Persian Gulf in two small riverine boats when communications with them ceased

they were confronted by IRGC patrol boats and taken to an Iranian naval facility on Farsi Island

Obama’s former defense secretary let loose on a White House that micromanaged the Pentagon while

contends that the refusal to enforce the chemical weapon red line in Syria “hurt the credibility of the president’s word”

his might be dismissed as sour grapes from a Republican who believes that the White House was eventually out to “destroy” him

“I think when we stepped out of Iraq, in many ways, we created this vacuum in which not a lot of attention was paid to what was happening in Iraq,

In one way or another, many of these criticisms concern Syria.

When the decision was made in 2010 to surge the number of American troops in Afghanistan,

by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon.”

secretary of state, secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, director of the CIA

Obama rejected both. The administration was “consistently behind the curve,

These events have produced more than 250,000 Syrian dead, including more than 10,000 children;

United States as an unreliable strategic partner; and allowed Iran and Russia to make a play for greater regional influence.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad,”

United States with essential intelligence and given the “credible opposition”

The rise of the Islamic State, in other words, is a catastrophic result of negligence in Syria.

They only judge him dramatically wrong on the largest strategic and humanitarian issue of our time.

Washington’s goal “is not war, but rather the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with you and the Korean people in confronting the threats posed by the Kim Jong Un regime,” Mr. Mattis said.

following a string of provocative nuclear and missile tests this year, North Korea has gone more than a month without a test

At a surprise press conference in February, Jean-Claude Juncker announced he had been keeping a secret: the commission's top civil servant, the secretary-general, was retiring. Martin Selmayr would take his place.It emerged that Mr Selmayr had applied for the role of deputy secretary-general, got that job and was then instantly promoted.

It has been suggested that the only other candidate in the race to become deputy withdrew their application, meaning Mr Selmayr had a clear run to the top. It has been alleged that members of the European Commission were offered more generous severance packages as inducements to smooth Mr Selmayr's path, which is vigorously denied.It is claimed that he even plans to knock down walls in the commission's management suite to cement his power.

The European Parliament is to hold a debate about it. A motion calls for a formal inquiry into the appointment and more transparency in the recruitment process in general."The way Martin Selmayr was appointed puts the European institutions into disrespect. If this procedure was corresponding to the rules, the rules have to be changed," said Green MEP Sven Giegold.

To MEPs outside the most powerful parliamentary groups it looks like jobs for the boys.To campaigning reporters it smells bad. To less zealous journalists it is great gossip.To Brexiteers it is a "coup" that proves the EU's structures are opaque and undemocratic.To me, it is the latest twist in a long-running tussle over where power lies in Europe: with the member states or with an increasingly political commission that seeks to protect the very idea of the EU.

Kennedy told me that at one point she believed Tillerson would leave after the State Department’s redesign (a process that’s not yet complete) and use that contribution as his legacy. But it seemed as if the incessant leaks made “him dig his feet in … to stick with the job whether he was enjoying it or not.”

Tillerson and some of his colleagues may be safe for now—but there’s no guarantee that the president will be satisfied with them in the near future. When Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, asked Trump last November about Tillerson, the president said his secretary of state was “working hard” and “doing his best.” But when she asked Trump whether the secretary would last for the duration of the president’s term, Trump replied: “We’ll see.”

Enthusiasts like Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and frontman of the 2016 referendum campaign for Brexit, argued that Britain could have its cake and eat it. His colleague, Michael Gove, who is now environment secretary, insisted that Britain held “all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” while another supporter of withdrawal, David Davis, a former Brexit secretary, said that there would be “no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside.”

“The last two or three generations have been left in a sort of time vacuum,” he added, “where they are still living in the past, with the idea that they are an empire, they won the Second World War and they can decide what they want.”

“In Denmark in 1864 there was a feeling that, ‘If this is reality, we deny reality’ — the view that it shouldn’t be like this, and if it is like this, it is wrong.

“The Brexiteers think, ‘We won the war but we lost the peace and we are going to win it back,’” he added. “They will be surprised when they try to resurrect the empire.”

“Sometimes there are events that have an effect as a catalyzer to open your eyes to the reality around you,

Might Brexit, a similarly interminable riddle, produce some sort of a benign renewal?Professor Ostergaard thinks it could, if Britain acknowledges reality and accepts its scaled-down modern status. He notes that, in forcing Denmark to come to terms with its true size, 1864 was the foundation of the small but successful contemporary Danish state.

“It was the most important point, completely dominating everything,” he said. “It was a defeat, but in the defeat the beginning of a success story, and of a national story as a small power.”

The new application includes a series of eligibility questions that ask whether an applicant is a U.S. citizen, a resident of California, at least 18 years old, not currently in state or federal prison or on parole for a felony conviction, and whether he or she has been found mentally incompetent to vote by a court. Voter registration data received from the DMV is also checked against existing records in California's statewide voter registration database, according to Sam Mahood, press secretary for California's Secretary of State Alex Padilla.