Politics

Back on July 20, a suicide bomber detonated in Suruc, Turkey, killing 33 people. 

Suruc is a mere stone’s throw away from the Syrian border and from Kobani, where many of those killed were planning on assisting in a rebuilding effort.

The attack was quickly attributed to Islamic State. Two days later, two Turkish police officers were killed by the PKK in Ceylanpinar. Kurdish militants said the men had cooperated with ISIS. Their deaths, PKK’s Syrian affiliate said, were “in revenge for the massacre in Suruc.”

A former senior Pentagon chief has said that a terrorist attack using a nuclear bomb is almost a certainty within the next year.  Former US Defense Secretary William Perry says that there is a very “real and growing danger” of a nuclear bomb or device being used against the U.S. Sputniknews.com reports: During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Perry was secretly summoned to Washington to analyze intelligence on Soviet weapons in Cuba.

American economist Paul Craig Roberts has said that he believes the world to be closer to World War III than ever before, with the U.S. and Russia facing an inevitable nuclear conflict amid growing distrust between the two superpowers.  As tensions continue increase, he points out that NATO are ill-equipped to deal with a conventional war against Russia. Therefore, he says, the conflict is almost certainly going to be nuclear. Paulcraigroberts.org reports: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave birth to a dangerous American ideology called neoconservativism.

Saudi Arabai’s most senior cleric, Sheikh Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, has said that he believes ISIS to be part of the Israeli army in a recent interview where he urges more Islamic cooperation in defeating the terrorist regime.  The Mufti said that ISIS is an un-Islamic movement, and praised efforts by the Islamic military in fighting the regime.

In January 2014, during the scandalous aftermath of Edward Snowden's NSA snooping revelations, one which revealed the US had been spying on its closest allies for years, Obama banned U.S. eavesdropping on leaders of close friends and allies and promised he would begin reining in the vast collection of Americans' phone data in a series of limited reforms.

Below are the key highlights from his January 17, 2014 speech: