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at this point we know Trump quite well.

1: Trump is a Damaged Personality: Trump is an impulsive narcissist who is easily bored and driven mainly by the desire to chalk up 'wins' which drive the affirmation and praise which are his chief need and drive. He needs to dominate everyone around him and is profoundly susceptible to ego injuries tied to not 'winning', not being the best, not being sufficiently praised and acclaimed, etc. All of this drives a confrontational style and high levels of organizational chaos and drama.

2: Trump is a Great Communicator: Trump has an intuitive and profound grasp of a certain kind of branding. It's not sophisticated. But mass branding seldom is. It is intuitive, even primal. 'Make America Great Again' may be awful and retrograde in all its various meanings. But it captured in myriad ways almost every demand, fear and grievance that motivated the Americans who eventually became the Trump base

Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of Syria’s oil and gas resources, a rare generator of cash in the country’s war-battered economy, and are now using the proceeds to underwrite their fights against one another as well as President Bashar al-Assad, American officials say.

control of them has bolstered the fortunes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the Nusra Front, both of which are offshoots of Al Qaeda. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is even selling fuel to the Assad government, lending weight to allegations by opposition leaders that it is secretly working with Damascus to weaken the other rebel groups and discourage international support for their cause.

The Nusra Front and other groups are providing fuel to the government, too, in exchange for electricity and relief from airstrikes, according to opposition activists in Syria’s oil regions.

13 November 2013 Last updated at 06:45 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Nigeria: US 'to name Boko Haram as a terrorist group' Boko Haram frequently clashes with the Nigerian armed forces Continue reading the main story Nigeria under attack Afraid to go to school Dead or alive Vigilante war Gunning for Boko Haram The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation.

The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation

t will become a crime under US law to provide material support to the group

The United States and 10 Arab and European nations expressed support on Tuesday for the convening of a peace conference next month in Geneva to begin negotiations on a political settlement to end the bloody civil war in Syria.

John Kerry acknowledged that the moderate Syrian opposition had not yet decided whether it would attend.

It reiterated that a transitional government should be established as part of a political settlement

Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered an inquiry into the activities in Britain of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamic organizations, to determine in part whether it is using London as a base for planning extremist attacks following the military crackdown in Egypt, officials and media reports said on Tuesday.

“Given the concerns now being expressed about the group and its alleged links to violent extremism, it’s absolutely right and prudent that we get a better handle of what the Brotherhood stands for, how they intend to achieve their aims and what that means for Britain,”

Word of the inquiry first emerged in The Times of London, which said leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met in London last year to plan their response to Mr. Morsi’s overthrow.

The last Iraqi security forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi on Sunday, as the city fell completely to the militants of the Islamic State, who ransacked the provincial military headquarters, seizing a large store of weapons, and killed people loyal to the government, according to security officials and tribal leaders.

represented the biggest victory so far this year for the extremist group, which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls.

The fall of Ramadi also laid bare the failed strategy of the Iraqi government, which had announced last month a new offensive to retake Anbar Province, a vast desert region in the west of which Ramadi is the capital.

Where the anti-mosque movement and escalating anti-Islam rhetoric is really resonating is with the Arab mainstream --- that vast middle ground which had hoped that the election of Barack Obama would mark a real change from the Bush administration but have grown increasingly disappointed.   The mosque issue has been covered heavily on Arab satellite TV stations such as al-Jazeera, and the images of angry Americans chanting slogans and waving signs against Islam have resonated much like the images of angry Arabs burning American flags and denouncing U.S. policy did with American viewers after 9/11.   The recent public opinion surveys showing widespread hostility towards Islam among Americans have also gotten a lot of attention. 

It's confirming the worst fears of too many mainstream Arabs and Muslims, and thus providing fodder for the extremists who hope to exploit that atmosphere. It's become a cliche to say so, but it's true:  by fueling the narrative of a clash of civilizations and an inevitable war between Islam and the West, this unfortunate trend is empowering extremists on all sides and weakening moderates.  That's exactly the dynamic which I warned about here and in my recent Foreign Affairs article, and it's one which counter-terrorism professionals and public diplomacy specialists alike understand needs to be broken before it's too late. 

Operating against extremists committed to killing Jewish civilians seems like a necessary part of any Israeli national security strategy. But what happens after the inevitable ceasefire matters as well, and we lack signs that the Netanyahu government is thinking strategically. Setting back the cause of extremists is half the battle; buttressing moderates is the other half. Netanyahu and his ministers are notably inexpert at helping the more moderate Palestinian factions strengthen their hold on the West Bank, and they specialize in putting their collective thumb in the eye of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. A clever post-conflict Israeli strategy would be to help the Palestinian Authority extend its mandate more deeply into Gaza

Israel must take the interim steps, regardless of Palestinian participation, to protect its democratic character. Israeli moderates must "demand a complete halt to construction in the settlements, the evacuation of illegal outposts, a reexamination—once the current tension has ebbed—of the Israel Defense Forces’ deployment in the West Bank, and the removal of what remains of the Gaza blockade (possibly in coordination with Egypt

I'm not hopeful at all that the Netanyahu government will listen to such advice. Because myopia has shown itself to be the enemy of compromise and progress in Israel, and not just in Gaza.

Led by Marine Le Pen, the Front National (FN) won around 30 percent of the votes in France's regional elections on Sunday. That makes the party, which most observers consider to be far-right extremist, the clear winner

This was only the first round, and less than half of French voters bothered to show up to the polls. It's therefore not unlikely that the FN's opponents will rally their troops and combine their forces in the second round of elections this coming weekend

Some observers already imagine a future in which Marine Le Pen becomes president of France and subsequently engineers France's withdrawal from the European Union of which the country is a founding member

Islamic militant groups ignored contact attempts from Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik in the months before she and her husband killed 14 people at a California holiday party

groups almost certainly included al Qaeda’s Syria-based official affiliate

extremely wary of responding to outsiders they do not know or who have not been introduced to them

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this.

Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture. Instead of walking around or standing at the lectern, as I typically do, I sat as I tried to teach students how to read the poetry of Sappho. Inadvertently, I spoke more quietly, more timidly.

The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.

History, though, tells a different story.

King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.

A German court has jailed eight members of the far-right group called Freital, for a number of crimes including attempted murder and terror offences.

Prosecutors said the group's members attempted to create a "climate of fear" with a series of attacks on political opponents and refugees in 2015.

The group were found guilty of two attacks on refugee homes, two on far-left political offices and one on a residential complex.

There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents

White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration

this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant

Mr. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.

The case of Imam Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Mr. Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.

“They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”

the basic deal that traditional elites offered to the people at the inception of our political system: “As long as you let us call the shots, we will pretend to let you rule.”

Today, that deal is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and the reason is both unlikely and counterintuitive

Until a few decades ago, governments and big media companies enjoyed an oligopoly over the means of mass communication. As a result, they could set the standards of acceptable political discourse.

One day after the assault in the eastern Belgian city of Liège, which further unnerved a country that was already on edge after two deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016, officials confirmed that they were investigating the case as possible terrorism, but cautioned that other factors were in play

“There are signs that allow us to speak of radicalization in prison,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon said about the assailant’s possible motives. “But it can also be because he had no prospects anymore in our society, as he also committed a murder the night before.”

Mr. Herman had been serving a continuous series of prison sentences for theft, assault and drug offenses since 2003.

A storm appears to be gathering on the horizon. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency estimates that there are now some 12,700 far-right activists in the country who are “ready to use violence”.

These fall into several overlapping categories. There are a number of outright neo-Nazi terror cells such as the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which carried out ten racially motivated murders in the 2000s, and Combat 18 — the number is a reference to Adolf Hitler, whose initials are the first and eighth letters of the alphabet — a Hesse-based network with which Mr Lübcke’s alleged murderer, Stephan Ernst, 45, is thought to have been well acquainted.

Then there are perhaps 19,000 Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”), a loose and eclectic movement whose devotees reject the legitimacy of the modern German state and seek to govern themselves under the laws that prevailed in the age of the Kaisers