Out of sight for a month, young Kim is supposedly ill. But rumors are swirling he’s been deposed—and North Korea’s second most powerful man now feels confident enough to travel South. Hwang Pyong So must be feeling pretty good about himself right now.
The Palestinians are pushing a United Nations resolution that makes stiff demands against Israel and could put the Obama administration in a difficult position should it come to a vote. The draft resolution, which was given to Fox News on Wednesday by a diplomat who wished to remain anonymous, calls on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem by November 2016 as part of a new push for independence and full U.N.
While Greek government yields (and political leaders) proclaim the troubled peripheral European nation is ‘recovering’, the risk of major political upheaval in Greece has not gone away ahead of next year’s presidential vote next year. As Reuters notes, under growing pressure from anti-bailout leftists, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras desperately needs a new narrative to get the backing of lawmakers and rally Greeks fed up with four years of austerity. We wish him luck as Keep Talking Greece notes, it is high time that the real data of the economic situation of the Greek society come to the surface and so it did this week.
China’s military has conducted the first flight test of a new variant of one of its road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles in a sign that Beijing is increasing its strategic strike capability against the United States. The test of a new DF-31B missile was conducted Sept. 25 from a missile test range in central China.
The longer the Ebola epidemic continues infecting people unabated the higher the chances it will mutate and become airborne, the UN’s Ebola response chief has warned. Anthony Banbury, the Secretary General’s Special Representative, has said there is a ‘nightmare’ prospect the deadly disease will become airborne if it continues infecting new hosts. His comments come as organisations battling the crisis in West Africa warned that the international community has just four weeks to stop it before it spirals ‘completely out of control’.
For the first time, Russia, which is in the midst of a major strategic nuclear modernization, has more deployed nuclear warheads than the United States, according to the latest numbers released by the State Department. Russia now has 1,643 warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. The United States has 1,642, said the fact sheet released Wednesday.
The intention was always to make the EU a tide to lift all boats, or even, in the wildest dreams, a boat to lift all tides. That intention has failed in dramatic fashion. But not one single one of the architects and present day leaders is ready to fess up to their failures.
The Temple Institute’s crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the modern architectural plans for the Third Holy Temple in Jerusalem came to a close on Rosh Hashanah after surpassing its $100,000 goal in 60 days. The initiative began on the first day of the month of Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of the ancient Holy Temples. Almost 900 pledges have come in from more than 30 countries worldwide.
Russia will construct a second naval base on the Black Sea and reinforce its fleet with 80 warships to ward off what it sees as an increasing NATO presence in the waters around the recently annexed Crimean Peninsula, the head of the Russia’s Black Sea fleet said Tuesday. A new base in the city of Novorossiisk will be built be 2016, and by the end of the decade Russia’s Black Sea force will tally 206 ships, Admiral Alexander Vitko was quoted as saying by state news agency TASS. “With Crimea’s return to Russia, the relevance of this base has increased due to the fact that NATO ships are consistently present in the Black Sea,” Vitko told President Vladimir Putin, who visited the construction site of the new base in Novorossiisk on Tuesday.
The global loss of species is even worse than previously thought, the London Zoological Society (ZSL) says in its new Living Planet Index. The report suggests populations have halved in 40 years, as new methodology gives more alarming results than in a report two years ago. The report says populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have declined by an average of 52%.
Last week, an airstrike from the American-led coalition nearly hit a command-and-control facility affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the moderate rebels the Obama administration says are America’s “boots on the ground,” according to two opposition leaders. They are asking the Obama administration to please coordinate with them in the future before America bombs its only allies in Syria. Since U.
Russia has delivered a behind-the-scenes threat to retaliate if airstrikes carried out by the U.S. or its allies target the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Middle Eastern security officials told WND.
Laws banning incest between brothers and sisters in Germany could be scrapped after a government ethics committee said the they were an unacceptable intrusion into the right to sexual self-determination. “Criminal law is not the appropriate means to preserve a social taboo,” the German Ethics Council said in a statement. “The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination is to be weighed more heavily than the abstract idea of protection of the family.
Over 100 Christians, including children, were arrested during a major house church raid on Sunday in Foshan city in China’s Guangdong Province. Close to 200 police officers stormed in during the service, eyewitnesses said, believed to be part of a large-scale crackdown on Christians in the country. “We don’t know exactly why they raided our church,” a local believer told watchdog group International Christian Concern, which has been keeping track of the rising tide of persecution in China.
After Russia tested a ground-launched cruise missile two months ago to break the its landmark nuclear limitation treaty signed with the US in 1987, Evan Braden Montgomery, a defense expert from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the United States has been debating whether or not to modify the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, reports National Interest magazine. The treaty was a landmark arms agreement which successfully prevented both the US and Soviet Union from fielding surface-to-surface ballistic and cruise missiles carry conventional or nuclear warheads within a range of 500-5500 kilometers. The State Department announced that Russia had violated the treaty to test a prohibited weapon in late July.
The FBI is monitoring a number of US citizens who have returned to America after fighting for the jihadist groups in Syria, including the Islamic State (Isil), the US has confirmed for the first time. An administration official told Time magazine that the US National Counterterrorism Center believes that approximately 100 US citizens have gone on jihad, but declined to specify how many have returned to the US. “It includes those who’ve gone, those who’ve tried to go, some who’ve come back and are under activeâ?
The so called ‘moderate’ rebels in Syria who have received arms and training from the US, have condemned the US led airstrikes on ISIS extremists, underscoring the fact that their fight is against the Syrian government, not the terrorists the Obama administration claims it is funding them to fight. The US-backed Harakat Hazm rebel group in Syria, which consists of an estimated 7000 fighters who have been given US weapons, slammed the US led airstrikes Tuesday, according to reports. “The sole beneficiary of this foreign interference in Syria is the [President Bashar] Assad regime, especially in the absence of any real strategy to topple him,” a statement posted by the group on Twitter reads.
An Algerian jihadist group linked to Islamic State released a video Wednesday purportedly showing the beheading of a French tourist who was abducted on Sunday, a U.S. terrorist watchdog group says.
The army base in Iraq’s western Anbar province had been under siege by Islamic State militants for a week, so when a convoy of armored Humvees rolled up at the gate, the Iraqi soldiers at Camp Saqlawiyah believed saviors had arrived. But this was no rescue attempt. The vehicles were driven by militants on suicide missions, and within seconds on Sunday the base had become a bloody scene of multiple bombings.
ISLAMIC State fighters are reportedly raping thousands of women in Iraq and Syria to mass-produce spawn who’ll follow in their footsteps. Young militants are running wild to the chagrin of their more sophisticated and PR-savvy commanders, an Iraqi official told The New York Post. The motivation of the rapists is said to be twofold: