Today, an estimated fifty million Iranians are going to elect the seventh president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are six candidates left in the race. One of them is Hassan Rohani, who, nearly ten years ago, was the Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council (SGSNS) and...

The White House this evening held a conference call at which it announced that the U.S. intelligence community has reassessed whether Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime has used chemical weapons against rebel fighters seeking its overthrow, and had concluded that chemical weapons had been used multiple times and had killed some...

The Egyptian military is attempting to restore calm in the wake of tensions between Cairo and Ethiopia concerning Addis Ababa’s announced intention to build a giant dam on the Nile. Egyptian military spokesman Ahmed Mohammed Ali said today that the situation “is not currently a military matter” adding that it...

South Korean pop star Psy is reportedly heading to Israel this summer. The singer is scheduled to perform two concerts, one in Tel Aviv and one in the resort city of Eilat. The K-pop icon’s “Gangnam Style” music video has been viewed on YouTube more than one billion times since...

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned Wednesday that spillover from Syria’s civil war is threatening the increasingly fragile four-decade ceasefire between Syria and Israel. Observers are specifically raising alarms about the potential collapse of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) – the U.N. peacekeeping mission which has monitored the...

Google has uncovered what the company calls thousands of “politically motivated” hacking attacks targeting the email accounts of Iranian users. The list of potential suspects is not extensive: “For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of...

The Lebanese army is threatening to retaliate against future Syrian attacks on Lebanese territory. The pointedly explicit warning comes after Damascus launched a helicopter gunship attack on the Lebanese border town of Arsal and injured two: The Lebanese army has warned it will immediately respond to any future cross-border attacks...

Thousands of lawyers took to the streets of Ankara and Istanbul Wednesday to protest the detention of dozens of their colleagues by Turkish police. The head of Istanbul’s Bar Association blasted the government: Addressing the lawyers, Ümit Kocasakal, head of Istanbul’s Bar Association, slammed the police crackdown. “The use of...

In the latest signs of growing extremism and intolerance in the Arab world’s most populous state, an teacher in Egypt has been fined for blasphemy and an Egyptian-German author critical of radicalism has gone into hiding in Europe. The teacher, a Coptic Christian, was fined this week 100,000 Egyptian pounds –...

The Treasury Department this week designated four Lebanese nationals for conducting operations on behalf of Hezbollah in western Africa. The Iran-backed terror group is part and parcel of a network in Africa responsible for that the New York Times describes as “spectacular” state and non-state violence. Treasury’s statement on the...