A car bomb exploded yesterday at a border crossing between Syria and Turkey, injuring a dozen people and heightening long-held fears that the Syrian conflict would spread to Turkey. The explosion came a day after a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Syrian military helicopter that Ankara reported had entered Turkish airspace and ignored repeated...

CNN describes “bickering” between Western and Russian diplomats struggling to hammer out the details of an agreement that would see the international community acting to seize Syria’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons: The agreement, reached by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry over the weekend, calls...

Iranian media is flatly denying the details of a Der Spiegel report published yesterday describing Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as ready to decommission the country’s uranium enrichment facility at Fordo in exchange for the West easing economic sanctions. Fordo is an underground military bunker that Iran has converted for enrichment...

The Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA) yesterday published key figures evaluating the latest business cycle. The report – outlined by [sub] CentralBanking.com – described an “enormous” drop in prospects for a robust West Bank economy. The PMA blamed Israel for the situation, but also noted that Syrian-driven instability and a “political...

The Egyptian army’s ongoing campaign to uproot jihadist infrastructure in the Sinai Peninsula has in recent days focused heavily on the territory’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The military has begun demolishing buildings within a kilometer of the border, hoping to locate hidden tunnels which are used to move...

Yesterday Egypt’s army-backed interim government launched military operations to seize a town which had been controlled for weeks by Islamist supporters of the country’s former president Mohammed Morsi. The Islamists had attacked Christian buildings immediately after Morsi’s ouster, and had subsequently harassed and attacked Christians in the town. Today’s moves...

The United Nations investigation into the August 21 chemical weapons attack on rebel-controlled Damascus suburbs more or less conclusively demonstrated that the regime was behind the launch. The rocket trajectories led back to Syrian army positions. The chemical components point to Syrian army sophistication. Pentagon sources were even able to...

The Egyptian army today seized an Islamist-held town in central Egypt, deploying helicopter-backed military and police forces to dislodge loyalists of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. Supporters of the Islamist official had rampaged through the town of Dalga – looting and torching Christian buildings – after Morsi was removed from...

Analysts from the U.S.-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) are pushing back against statements made last week by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, to the effect that Iran has reduced its stock of 20 percent-enriched uranium from 240 kilograms to 140 kg...

The Wall Street Journal over the weekend evaluated the prospects for the Syrian chemical weapons disarmament deal struck by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The odds of success are, per four distinct scenarios unpacked by the paper, not great: But the road map unveiled...