The candor President Barack Obama displayed in the lengthy Atlantic article about his foreign policy “is destabilizing,” influential Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote in a column on Tuesday. Ignatius’s criticism of Obama is particularly notable, as he has generally been supportive of Obama’s foreign policy, including the nuclear deal...

Three Kurdish-led territories in northern Syria are expected to imminently announce a federal system, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The move will “[widen] the framework of self-administration which the Kurds and others have formed,” according to Idris Nassan, a representative of Kobani’s foreign affairs department. Kobani, Jazeera, and Afrin are the three regions that...

A U.S. District Court in New York ordered Iran last Wednesday to pay approximately $10.5 billion total to the families of 9/11 victims and to insurance companies who paid claims resulting from damages incurred during the attacks. Documents related to the lawsuit allege that some of the 9/11 hijackers visited Iran prior...

Axis Tel Aviv began on Tuesday at the Peres Center for Peace, and the local high-tech scene can expect new investing announcements at the end of the two-day event. The conference will display 25 of Israel’s most promising startups for venture capitalists and corporate investors from abroad. “Israel’s incredible advancement and innovation...

Russian diplomats are stressing that Israel’s national security interests will not be hurt by the country’s sudden announcement of its plans to withdraw troops from Syria, which Israel’s top general admitted took him by surprise, Ynet reported Tuesday. “We will try to ensure that this (Syria) crisis is resolved, and we will also...

Students and faculty at Oberlin College are “working actively to deal with this unprecedented situation” created by the controversial social media postings of Prof. Joy Karega, a professor at the school wrote Monday in The Forward. Karega was broadly condemned for making and promoting anti-Semitic statements in her Facebook posts, which were first revealed by The...

A top leader of the Lebanese Shi’a militia Hezbollah criticized the Arab League after the body designated them as a terrorist organization, saying that the move was part of a Saudi “declaration of aggression.” “Saudi Arabia is trying to affirm that Hezbollah is a terrorist group in all the forums that allow it...

The European Union and the United Nations have delayed any decision to impose sanctions on Iran after the Islamic Republic and its allies argued that its ballistic missile tests last week don’t violate the UN Security Council resolution that implemented last year’s nuclear deal, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) Monday. Russian Ambassador to...

A Palestinian legislator from Nablus is presenting an “unprecedented” challenge to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the PA’s rampant corruption, according to a report by Jonathan Schanzer and Grant Rumley published Monday in The Daily Beast. Schanzer and Rumley are respectively the vice president for research and a research fellow...

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D – N.Y.) said that an Iranian cyber-attack on a dam near New York City was a “shot across the bow” of the United States, which should be answered with harsher sanctions, the Associated Press reported on Friday. “Now it looks clear that the Iranians did it,” Schumer said during...