The Syrian civil war, now in its fifth year, involves multiple countries with overlapping and at times conflicting agendas. Competing visions of how to manage the conflict, which has led to a major global refugee crisis as well as the rise of the Islamic State, dominated discussions at the United Nations General Assembly this week. But despite days of meetings and diplomatic maneuvering, the crisis has only […]
UNITED NATIONS — Over the last four years, as four million Syrian refugees poured into neighboring countries and slipped inexorably into poverty, António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said he had pleaded in vain with world leaders to take their plight more seriously. But suddenly, at the United Nations General Assembly this week, leaders of the world’s most powerful countries want to meet with […]
OBAMA HAS TO WORK WITH PUTIN TO DEESCALATE By Arun Srivastava By sending troops in support of the Assad regime…
UNITED NATIONS — President Obama called upon a conclave of world leaders on Tuesday to fight violent extremism with not only weapons, but also ideas, jobs and good governance, a strategy he has long advocated. There are few signs that it is succeeding. Military pressure, Mr. Obama said at a United Nations summit meeting, will be insufficient to vanquish groups like the Islamic State, also known as […]
|By Matein Khalid| Even as China’s President meets the capo di tutti capi in Seattle, its manufacturing PMI falls to 47, a post Lehman low, with new export orders in a slump. I found it significant that the offshore yuan fell 200 pips to 6.4346 after the PMI. This proves my core argument, outlined a month ago. The Middle Kingdom will respond to its economic decline and […]
INTERNATIONAL. What started as a civil war in Syria nearly five years ago has now evolved into an international crisis unmatched by any other since World War II. The global community now has a solemn obligation to end this humanitarian disaster, but it cannot do so unless all the powers affected by the conflict set aside their differences in order to end the suffering of millions of […]
While Dubai continues to pump out sumptuous new apartment blocks, for a rising number of expatriates the city no longer offers the luxury lifestyle that lured many foreigners to the Gulf. A shortage of affordable homes and a reduction in overseas allowances since the financial crisis are pushing foreign staff on middle incomes out to less glamorous areas of the city far from the office, or to […]
Middle East Secretary of State John Kerry with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, on Sunday. By MICHAEL R. GORDON September 27, 2015 The Iraqi military announced Sunday that it had agreed to share intelligence about the Islamic State with Russia, the Syrian government and Iran, an agreement that caught the Obama administration off guard. The Iraqi military said in a statement that the new agreement was necessary because […]
Middle East Secretary of State John Kerry, left, with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the United Nations on Saturday. By MICHAEL R. GORDON September 26, 2015 UNITED NATIONS — Secretary of State John Kerry sought on Saturday to draw Iran into the search for a political solution to the Syrian conflict as he began a week of diplomacy over the brutal fighting there. “I view this week as […]
WASHINGTON — Nearly 30,000 foreign recruits have now poured into Syria, many to join the Islamic State, a doubling of volunteers in just the past 12 months and stark evidence that an international effort to tighten borders, share intelligence and enforce antiterrorism laws is not diminishing the ranks of new militant fighters. Among those who have entered or tried to enter the conflict in Iraq or Syria […]
AMMAN, Jordan — Mohammad Smarat sat gazing at the few plants sprouting outside the entrance of the white stone hospital here, recalling how he had collapsed in a sea of green fields after getting shot. He had been helping farmers pick tomatoes near his home in Dara’a, Syria, when a stray bullet shattered his left hip joint. Though he had obeyed his father’s orders not to join […]
Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY Dozens of Finnish nationalists, including a man dressed like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, hurled rocks and fireworks late on Thursday at a bus carrying migrants seeking asylum to temporary housing in Finland, the state broadcaster YLE reported. Reporters in Lahti, about 60 miles north of the capital, Helsinki, recorded video of the bus — which carried men, women and […]
INTERNATIONAL. Gleaming glass skyscrapers, state-of-the-art technology, and wealthy merchant families have replaced the Gulf’s muddy towns and villages populated by traders and pearl fishers that once lacked electricity, running water or modern communications. The region’s modern day projection of a visionary cutting- edge, 21st century urban environment masks however the fact that some things have not changed. Gulf states continue to be ruled by the same families, […]
Contrary to common portrayals of the madding crowd, people caught in an unfolding catastrophe usually summon their best selves, keep cool heads and look out for those around them, according to decades of research into crowd reactions during earthquakes, fires, floods, bombings and other threats. It had not been reported exactly what touched off the panic that killed more than 700 people on Thursday near Mecca, Saudi […]
WASHINGTON — As the war in Iraq deteriorated, a senior American intelligence analyst went public in 2005 and criticized President George W. Bush’s administration for pushing “amateurish and unrealistic” plans for the invasion two years before. Now that same man, Gregory Hooker, is at the center of an insurrection of United States Central Command intelligence analysts over America’s latest war in Iraq, and whether Congress, policy makers […]
SANA, Yemen — Bombings at a mosque killed at least 25 people here on Thursday during prayers to commemorate the beginning of Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday, Interior Ministry officials said. Tamim al-Shami, a spokesman for Yemen’s Health Ministry, said that the mosque, in the Al-Bilili neighborhood, was struck by two bombs, one hidden in a shoe and left at the entrance of the mosque, and […]
LONDON — Russia’s military buildup in Syria now includes surface-to-air missiles as well as combat aircraft with air-to-air capability, deployments that raise “serious questions” about Moscow’s role in the region, Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday. Russian officials have said that the purpose of the buildup at a base near Latakia, Syria, is to combat the Islamic State. But the deployment of air defense systems and […]
ABU DHABI // European nations need a unified response to the refugee crisis to prevent the situation from worsening, a senior Italian official has said. Andrea Orlando, the country’s minister of justice, said there should be a common policy to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people who are fleeing conflict in Syria, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, to head to the European Union. “Italy […]
News Analysis President Obama in Washington on Wednesday. White House aides said Mr. Obama had always been skeptical about training Syrian rebels. By PETER BAKER September 17, 2015 WASHINGTON — By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually […]
Middle East World Briefing By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS September 16, 2015 Lebanese police officers beat back protesters with clubs and sticks and arrested dozens on Wednesday in Beirut in the latest confrontations over the country’s summer trash crisis. A small group of activists had gathered near the Parliament building, some carrying eggs to pelt politicians’ convoys while others tried to block the street. Riot officers beat two demonstrators, and the […]
WASHINGTON — Only four or five Syrian individuals trained by the United States military to confront the Islamic State remain in the fight, the head of the United States Central Command told a Senate panel on Wednesday, a bleak acknowledgment that the Defense Department’s $500 million program to raise an army of Syrian fighters has gone nowhere. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the top American commander in […]
September 15, 2015 Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY Two French illustrators have been denounced on social networks in recent days for publishing editorial cartoons inspired by harrowing photographs of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy whose drowning in the waters off Greece this month prompted an outpouring of sympathy for migrants. Most of the outrage has been directed at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French newspaper that was […]
|By TAP Staff| Global investors’ confidence in the world’s economic outlook has fallen significantly due to concerns over China and emerging markets, according to the BofA Merrill Lynch Fund Manager Survey for September. Asset allocators have adopted a “risk-off” stance in response. Some of the responses are: Threat of recession in China increases as biggest tail risk; concern over a potential emerging markets debt crisis also rises […]
CAIRO — The mistaken airstrike by the Egyptian military that killed a dozen people on a Mexican tourist trip in the Western Desert hit at a picnic in the middle of the day, witnesses said Monday, raising new questions about both the extent of the error and the official explanations. The convoy of four sport utility vehicles was about three hours southwest of Cairo on a typical […]
