Damascus has ruled out talks with a bulk of the opposition forces battling to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, excluding among others the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and calling into question the viability of peace talks scheduled to take place between various factions in November. “Assad is...

The New York Times reports that Western sanctions against Iran have put the country on the brink of economic collapse, with restrictions on financial transactions in particular having created severe hard currency shortages. Businesspeople in Iran have seen this coming and have been adapting, said one economic analyst, who asked...

A French diplomat who was filmed taking a swing at an Israeli soldier will be expelled from Israel, after Jerusalem filed a complaint with Paris about the incident. The incident occurred while Marion Fesneau-Castaing was participating in a European Union delegation delivering supplies to Palestinians attempting to rebuild illegally-built –...

A group of European and global leaders – drawn from political, military, intellectual, and activist circles – are calling on European Union foreign ministers to reevaluate recently passed guidelines cutting off cooperation between European institutions and Israeli establishments beyond Israel’s 1948 armistice lines. A letter sent by the group (embedded...

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seemed set Friday night to adopt a resolution aimed at dismantling Syria’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons. For weeks the UNSC’s Western nations – the United States, Britain, and France – had been demanding that the measure include some means of automatic enforcement if...

The phone call today between President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was the first direct contact between a U.S. president and his Iranian counterpart since Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy during Iran’s Islamic Revolution and seized fifty two American hostages. The New York Times notes that Rouhani,...