The Islamic Republic of Iran seized two U.S. Navy vessels while they were navigating the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, detaining the ships and ten American sailors near Iran’s Farsi Island, the Pentagon said.
A federal judge on Monday sentenced one former Blackwater guard to life in prison and three others to nearly 30 years behind bars for their role in killing 14 unarmed civilians, including women and children, and injuring 18 others in Iraq.
The Somali terror group Al-Shabaab has taken credit for a suicide bombing and subsequent raid on a government building in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in which at least 17 people have died, according to the most recent estimates.
The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday decided to impose an arms embargo on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and their allies, including former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son.
Republican Senator Jeff Flake wasted no time in enthusiastically embracing a White House declaration Tuesday removing Cuba from a United States State Department list of state sponsors of terror, despite the communist country’s ongoing harboring of terrorists and ties to terrorist organizations.
A Germanwings Airbus A320 had to be evacuated at the Cologne-Bonn international airport on Sunday evening after someone emailed police a bomb threat less than twenty minutes before the flight’s scheduled departure.
“At the European level, we estimate that 5,000-6,000 individuals have left for Syria,” European Union Justice Commissioner Vera Jouriva told Le Figaro in a Monday interview, as transcribed by AFP. She went on to say this was a very conservative estimate, because keeping tabs on foreign fighters in the Syrian theater is extremely difficult.
If you still wonder why our nation’s politics are so divided, look no further than Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s half-witted attempt to accuse Republicans—and Israelis—of hypocrisy in opposing the Iran deal. The same neocons and Likudniks who opposed any Iran deal, Milbank says, now want to stick with the interim deal, or argue for a “better deal” than the one President Barack Obama is proposing. Conclusion: they are liars, warmongers, and above all, Obama-haters.
Washington Post bureau chief Jason Rezaian has been languishing in an Iranian prison cell for nearly nine months, with only the most cursory access to legal counsel. The newspaper reports today that Rezaian is having significant problems being allowed to speak to his attorney, and will remain in prison until his trial begins for “espionage.”
The White House announced today that Cuba will be removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, despite its ties to Marxist, jihadist, and other separatist terrorist organizations. The removal of the state sponsor of terror label is believed to be the beginning of diplomatic relations with Cuba that can lead to the potential establishment of a U.S. embassy in Havana.
The Saudi-owned, London-based Al-Hayat news site was taken over on Monday by hackers that identified themselves as part of a pro-Houthi “Yemen Cyber Army,” in an Arabic message displayed for its readers.
President Barack Obama will remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, the White House announced Tuesday, a key step in his bid to normalize relations between the two countries.
A clash between the Marxist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkish armed forces (TSK) left five militants dead and wounded four Turkish soldiers. The fight occurred despite the PKK leader’s call for a ceasefire in March. Now the fights threaten to end fragile peace talks while pro-Kurdish groups accuse Turkey of staging the attacks.
Lt. Gen. Mick Bednarek, the top U.S. military official in Iraq and chief of the Office of Security Cooperation, said ISIS in Iraq could be defeated in one year, but added that battling the jihadist group elsewhere will be “the fight of our lifetime.”
Ibrahim al-Rubaish, the ideological leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has been killed by a “Crusader raid,” the jihadi group said in a statement released Tuesday.
Defying threats of a presidential veto, critics of the Iran deal reached a bipartisan compromise on Tuesday that will allow the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act–the “Corker-Menendez bill”–to proceed to a vote with a veto-proof two-thirds majority. The White House has backed down, fearing the embarrassment of a veto override on a key foreign policy issue. Yet the conditions that critics of the Iran deal had to accept will, in fact, make the deal easier to pass in its current form.
Two recently-released polls found that 42 percent of Canadian Muslims agree that Islam is “irreconcilable” with Western society.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that he “condemns” Pope Francis for his use of the expression “genocide” when referring to the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915-1917.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi is in Washington for his first visit in office, and is scheduled for a meeting with President Obama at which he will request a massive increase in military aid against the Islamic State. A senior Iraqi official told Reuters, “We’re talking about billions here… This is a new approach for us because of the scale of the challenge we have ahead. Mosul and Nineveh province and Anbar will cost us a lot.”
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, reported that the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) turned the Catholic cathedral in Mosul into a mosque.
Zainub Priya Dala, a South African Muslim author and psychologist, was “violently attacked for expressing admiration for Salman Rushdie” the day after praising the author. After countless phoned-in threats to recant, Dala was placed under psychiatric care in which she was “drugged until I could not walk” and advised to adopt a proper Muslim lifestyle.
In a new report focusing on the employment of sexual assault as a weapon of terrorism, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon denounced violence against women and called for a concerted effort to put an end to the atrocities of Islamist extremists.
Kenya’s oldest newspaper, The Standard, reports that the Iranian government warned Kenyan officials that the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab was planning to attack Garissa University.
The Washington Post recently published a lengthy review of a book about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by Masha Gessen, entitled The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. The first problem with this book is the title.
Reverend Kim Dong-Shik, a Christian missionary, human rights activist and U.S. citizen, has been missing since 2000.
On April 14, 2014, the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram abducted more than 300 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok, cementing their international reputation as one of the most ruthless and dangerous terror groups in the world. One year later, more than 200 of those girls remain missing, and Nigeria’s president-elect is making no promises to find them.
