Canada decided to limit Syrians to families, single women and children. This sounds like a human rights violation: discrimination against single men, on the pretext that they could be terrorists. Not fair, but understandable, given the Paris bombings and the need to be seen to act carefully. There are lots of women and children and married men still alive there to fill the quota.
The Middle East is fertile ground for conspiracy theories, and one growing to towering heights these days says the US created the Islamic State. But while the US may well have aided ISIS in its formative days with covert supplies of weapons and CIA funding (directly or indirectly, via Turkey leading political families) the one nation most responsible for iteration after iteration of "terrorist organizations" is Saudi Arabia which "created" not only the Islamic State, but al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and many other Sunni Jihadist groups in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan.
A mistrial was declared yesterday in Baltimore for one of the police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Protests occurred immediately after the verdict was announced. One protester put it, "We want justice & we're just not going to get it". One thing seems clear w/this mistrial verdict of a black man dying while in police custody; the perception racial injustice is alive & well in America.
It has been a strange two days for US foreign policy.
Earlier today we reported that in what amounts to a significant blow to the official US position over Syria, namely the multi-year demands to replace president Assad with a western puppet ruler, John Kerry on Tuesday accepted Russia's long-standing demand that President Bashar Assad's future be determined by his own people, as Washington and Moscow edged toward putting aside years of disagreement over how to end Syria's civil war."
The alleged ties between Turkish President Erdogan and Islamist terrorists in Syria is an embarrassment for the Obama administration and the U.S. news media, which would prefer to look the other way rather than face up to the danger created by an out-of-control NATO "ally," writes Robert Parry.