John Hayward

The new socialist government of Greece is not having much success convincing its European creditors to forget about billions of dollars in debt, and then loan Greece even more money. Bloomberg News reports Commerzbank AG is doubling the odds of a Greek exit from the Eurozone to 50 percent, which sounds like a polite underestimation of the odds, given the sudden and acrimonious end of the latest debt talks.

According to an article at the Kurdish outlet Rudaw, Peshmerga militia forces have had to turn back a high number of foreign fighters attempting to join the war on the Islamic State. Repeated attempts to discourage the foreign fighters and request arms aid instead have failed to stop the flow into Iraq.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry is demanding “the involvement of Palestinian investigators to clarify the circumstances of” the murder of three Muslim Americans in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Ministry denounced Chapel Hill shooter Craig Stephen Hicks as “an American extremist and hateful racist.”

Graeme Wood’s article, “What ISIS Really Wants,” in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic is a fantastic summary of how the Islamic State (ISIS) interprets Islam – and, perhaps more importantly, how the rest of the Islamic world looks at ISIS. It does a great deal of damage to President Obama’s preferred narrative about how the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam, as well as his characterization of the terror state as “nihilistic.”

As Libya descends into utter chaos, Italy became the last Western nation to close its embassy. It turns out Italian diplomats aren’t the only ones fleeing North Africa for safer shores, as a wave of some 2,000 “migrants” (as France24 describes them) hit the water in evidently unreliable boats, ran into trouble between Libya and the Italian island of Lamepdusa, and had to call for rescue from the Italian navy.

When one hears a story of Western civilians heading to the Middle East to volunteer for combat duty, one thinks of the hideously successful ISIS recruiting drive. However, as Reuters reports, “a handful of idealistic Westerners are enlisting” with a Christian militia group called Dwekh Nawsha, “citing frustration their governments are not doing more to combat the ultra-radical Islamists or prevent the suffering of innocents.”

A follow-up to Friday’s story about tribal leaders from Iraq’s Anbar province pleading with the Obama Administration for direct military support: those leaders now say Iraqi troops in the region are perhaps only “hours” away from crumbling against the ISIS assault.

A group of tribal leaders from Anbar province, Iraq, have finally found help in their fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) through the efforts of former President George W. Bush, who vowed to “do everything I can” to help those attempting to escape ISIS.

At a Stanford University cyber-security summit on Friday, President Obama is expected to announce yet another executive order bypassing Congress, this time pertaining to Internet security.

A report by Tim Mak at The Daily Beast has U.S. intelligence officials confirming that there are, indeed, concrete ties between the Islamic State and Nigerian jihadist terror group Boko Haram.

Every now and then, a story comes along that captures everything wrong with modern America. The Army’s decision to pay for hormone treatments so that convicted national-security leaker Bradley Manning can transform into Chelsea Manning while doing time in Leavenworth is such a story.

The Islamic State has its own magazine, called Dabiq, a slickly-produced English-language publication. In the latest issue, the terrorist group claims that it has captured an Israeli Arab who was recruited to spy for Israel’s Mossad spy agency.