Politics

In the following video interview, the former director of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, defends the country’s treatment of wounded fighters from  al-Nusra Front on the Syrian border. (Scroll down for video) Al Jazeera reports: In this web extra, Efraim Halevy tells Mehdi Hasan that he is not concerned that Israel had treated fighters in Syria from al-Nusra Front, which some say is al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch. “It’s always useful […] to deal with your enemies in a humane way,” Halevy says.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union — in terms Americans can understand.

Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court?

 

The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister has said that the increase in NATO’s military presence near Russia’s borders will not go unanswered. “The Russian side has repeatedly stated that the buildup of the NATO military presence near Russian borders violates the spirit of the basic Russia-NATO pact and cannot be left unanswered by our country,” Aleksey Meshkovan told an international conference in Moscow. RT reports: The comments came soon after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg spoke at Warsaw University, where he said that the bloc planned to station even more military forces in Europe.

With more Americans having an unfavorable view of Obamacare than favorable and Clinton continuing to take credit for the law on the campaign trail, establishment Democrats are beginning to realize another (non-email, non-charity, non-vote-fraud-related) crisis looms for Hillary - the problem of dramatically higher Obamacare premium hikes in an election year.

We have it on highest authority: the recent killing of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan marks “an important milestone.” So the president of the United States has declared, with that claim duly echoed and implicitly endorsed by media commentary—the New York Times reporting, for example, that Mansour’s death leaves the Taliban leadership “shocked” and “shaken.”

But a question remains: A milestone toward what exactly?