Officials closely linked to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas are being investigated by a Palestinian watchdog group for corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement. The Coalition for Transparency in Palestine announced yesterday that it was checking into no fewer than 29 claims that PA officials stole public funds. Endemic corruption within political...

The news site EUobserver conveyed this morning a new Europol report that seems to confirm that the joint police body has adopted the findings of Bulgarian investigators linking the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah to the July 2012 Burgas bus bombing that killed five Israelis and a Bulgarian. The announcement comes on...

Senator Lindsey Graham talked to CNN yesterday about the prospects that the Jordanian monarchy will survive the strain of Syrian war spillover. Prognosis: uneven: Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that “If [the Syrian civil] war doesn’t end soon, the king of Jordan is going to be...

A controversial map published in a major Turkish newspaper is threatening to ignite regional concerns about Turkish expansionism and neo-Ottomanism. The map – which was published in Milliyet and is similar to another report published in the Hurriyet daily – was accompanied a report describing a “New Turkey” that could be...

Human rights groups are blasting Iran for a wave of executions that this week saw four prisoners hanged in the western city of Kermanshah, two of them women. Kermanshah has become a central location for the Iranian regime’s public and prison executions. Iran has one of the world’s worst records...

Hezbollah’s decision to launch a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) toward Israel today is not straightforward to understand. In that sense it’s similar to the decision to kidnap two Israeli soldiers in July 2006, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, which triggered a war. Many analysts will conclude that the organization’s...

Egyptian Islamists who control the country’s parliament are pushing ahead with controversial legislation aimed at forcing the retirement of judges inside Egypt’s relatively secular Egyptian judiciary. Opposition figures and foreign analysts have long feared that Morsi and his allies were aiming to intimidate or purge judges who have served as checks on...

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Syrian army used chemical weapons against opposition forces, according to statements made today by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel first revealed the intelligence assessment, which was detailed in a letter to select members of Congress, while speaking to reporters...

Israeli officials have confirmed that a drone that tried to penetrate Israeli air space today was launched from Lebanon, even as the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah rushes to deny responsibility. Hezbollah has in the past boasted about launching drones against Israel. Lebanese leaders responded by blasting the group for risking...

Bahrain is calling on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to boost its response to Iranian activity in the region. Shaikh Rashid Bin Abdullah Al Khalifa blasted Tehran for links to a series of recent terror plots in the region, including an incident in which an allegedly Iran-backed terror cell was...