Last December – amid reports of Al Qaeda setting up strongholds in Syria in Iraq – terrorists affiliated with the international terrorist organization attacked Yemen’s defense ministry, killing over 50 people and wounding more than 160. The head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Nasser al-Wuhayshi, had recently...

The Federal Aviation Administration is testing the viability of having drones operate in civilian airspace. So is the European Union. Drone delivery services are being developed in the Gulf, in Africa, and of course famously by Amazon.com in North America. It was all but inevitable that Israel, a global leader...

Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s trip to Moscow – where he is discussing among other things a multi-billion dollar arms sale – is being read as evidence that Egypt is actively seeking to bolster its relations with Russia. Foreign policy analysts had worried for months that U.S. snubs were...

Iranian-backed terror groups in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip are prepared to saturation bomb Israeli population centers across the country, according to assessments provided this week by intelligence analysts and boasts issued by Iranian figures. Hossein Sheikholeslam, the Iranian Parliament speaker’s top adviser for international affairs, reportedly bragged to Iranian media that “Now...

Iranian figures continued this week to lengthen the list of red lines they intend to take into comprehensive nuclear negotiations, weeks after statements by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani – in which the revolutionary-era cleric rejected destroying nuclear enrichment centrifuges – had already led CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to declare that he wasn’t sure...

Among the many reasons that normally circumspect analysts harshly criticized the Obama administration’s moves to cut off assistance to Egypt’s army-backed government – the importance of bilateral military ties, the need to support Egyptian counter-terror efforts, etc. – one persistent theme involved the worry that Russia would gladly fill in...

Israel’s reputation as an innovation nation – which seems set for very pointed reinforcement in 2014 – long ago began approaching the status of conventional wisdom. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it a central feature of his recent speech at Davos, and collaboration with the Jewish state is now...

The Dead Sea Scrolls are uncontroversially one of the great archaeological finds of the last few centuries, providing historical, theological, social, and even linguistic insight into the earliest development of Hebrew scriptures. And now they’re online, thanks to a collaboration with Google and an innovative photography technique used by the...

Palestinian figures have again publicly rejected Israel’s calls to recognize the country as a homeland for the Jewish people in the context of a comprehensive peace deal, with top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat squashing rumors that Ramallah had shifted from its oft-repeated rejection of the condition. “I told minister Livni in Munich recently that we won’t...

Iranian news is boasting that the Syrian army has regained control of the strategic border town of Jarajir near Lebanon. The reports are contested – the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the town is still contested – but the Syrian army has been pounding the area, including the town...