“Top Egyptian intelligence officers met recently with senior Hamas officials from outside the Gaza Strip to discuss the poor relations between Egypt and the Strip’s Hamas regime, senior officials of the Islamist organization confirmed on Tuesday,” Israel’s Haarez wrote on Wednesday.
Fourteen members of a banned Islamic group called Forsane Alizza (“Knights of Pride”) are on trial in Paris for planning a wave of attacks against Jewish-owned stores, similar to the hostage standoff and killings that took place at the Hyper Cacher grocery store after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January.
Kaspersky Lab ZAO, one of the top anti-virus firms in the world, claims to have discovered a virus favored by Israeli intelligence in the computer systems of three luxury hotels used for nuclear negotiations with Iran. If this discovery is verified and definitively linked to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, it would represent the first concrete evidence that Israel was spying on the negotiations, as everyone informally assumes they were doing.
President Obama’s eagerness to set his Iranian partners-in-peace up with a fully functional economy and functional nuclear weapons is not generating much reciprocal affection from Tehran. Iran’s Fars news agency reports that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s top adviser for foreign affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared his country “is keen to build closer military ties with China, welcoming Beijing to expand its naval presence worldwide.”
Recent reports from Syria suggest the military forces of dictator Bashar Assad are crumbling under the strain of fighting a five-year-long civil war, and dealing with the rise of the Islamic State, which has been scoring military victories in Syria as well as Iraq.
It’s pretty rich to watch Democrat media drag out an Obama-donor financial analyst to critique the Rubio family budget. At least the Rubios have a budget, which is more than congressional Democrats can say. Let me know when Senator and Mrs. Rubio start using continuing resolutions and “cromnibus” techniques to buy stuff, with a vague plan to force their neighbors to pay all the bills when they find it impossible to rack up more debt.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew was given the unenviable job of defending President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran on Sunday at a conference in New York sponsored by the Jerusalem Post.
Belgian police have made 16 arrests after a series of 21 raids nationwide, targeting “religious jihadism in a part of the Chechen community,” as the prosecutor’s office was quoted by AFP.
The strain of dealing with the massive wave of refugees pouring off the coast of war-torn, ISIS-threatened Libya and flowing across the Mediterranean is proving too much for Italy. A backlash is growing against the migrant wave, although it is unclear what any faction of the Italian body politic, or the wider European Union, is prepared to do to stop it.
We are meant to imagine an innocent, if perhaps a bit high-spirited, gathering of cheerful teens interrupted by a brutal racist cop, who couldn’t wait to find the nearest young lady of color and body-slam her for fun. The reality seems a bit more… nuanced.
The UK Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister David Cameron “has refused to meet demands by Barack Obama that Britain commits to spending 2 per cent of its national income on defense for the next five years.”
ISIS has rampaged all the way from inner Libya to the Algerian border, prompting the Algerian military to raise its alert level, moving tens of thousands of troops over the past few months to the thousand kilometers of desert it shares with Libya.
It’s always difficult when a whirlwind romance dissolves into broken promises and shattered dreams. It’s especially difficult when the breakup involves an ISIS militant.
The news about the massive data breach of the Office of Personnel Management, and other federal agencies, by Chinese hackers just keeps getting worse. Estimates of the scope of the breach have increased since the initial reports on Friday, while the ability of the attackers to bypass state-of-the-art defensive software is frightening. Even so, some experts are saying the damage could have been contained if the government had taken better precautions to protect the pilfered data.
Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been drawing fire from Western media over some of his more colorful comments, such as rallying Muslims to take control of Jerusalem. He has finally managed to isolate the source of all that Western media coverage portraying him as anti-Semitic: Jewish money.
What else has China been up to lately, besides annexing disputed islands in the South China Sea and raiding U.S. government computer systems? First Post of India worries that China might be contemplating a “short border war with India, as in 1962.
The big question about the massive data breach of the U.S. federal government, perpetrated in April but just revealed to the American public yesterday, is whether the Chinese government was responsible.
Vocativ makes the interesting, and chilling, point that Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini—the Ayatollah, the guy Mickey Mouse was flipping off in all those seventies T-shirts—is doing very well on social media for a guy who died when computers were still bigger than dishwashers.
But why fret over explaining the pause you didn’t see coming, if you can just fiddle with a few spreadsheets and make it disappear? That’s what the authors of a new paper published in Science magazine did. They got rid of some data sets they didn’t like, added a few degrees here and there, and presto – the climate change pause is gone, replaced by the possibility of a very gentle warming trend that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the doomsday predictions of the Eighties and Nineties, which led to so many billions of dollars in spending.
For some reason, the New York Times decided to devote two reporters to the urgent task of reviewing Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s driving record over the past 18 years. And they still couldn’t make much of a story about it, so they decided to add his wife’s record to the story.
After years of resolutely ignoring workforce decline – claiming every downward tick in the nominal unemployment rate was pure, undiluted joyous news, even though most of those ticks occurred because hundreds of thousands of people were giving up and dropping out of the workforce entirely – liberals are falling all over themselves to bang out Tweets and blog posts explaining how it’s a good thing that same nominal unemployment rate just ticked up.
The French government has released some stunning figures to illustrate the intensity of ISIS recruiting efforts in their country. There are at least 2,600 websites in French, run by the terror state and its supporters, and they generate over 40,000 Twitter messages per day, reaching some 2.8 million followers.
AAP reports that Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said her government would consider sending more troops to help battle ISIS in Iraq, but the Iraqis have been oddly slow to request assistance, even as the Islamic State overruns cities and begins lining up an attack on Baghdad.
The Ontario Provincial Police have completed a report on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) response to jihadi gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who attacked Parliament Hill last October and murdered Corporal Nathan Cirillo.
A favorite game played at the nexus of Big Government and Big Business is the imposition of regulatory schemes that crush small players and upstart market competitors, while imposing bearable costs on established titan companies with high-powered lobbying operations.
