Relocating its weekly meeting to the Golan Heights Kibbutz Mevo Hama, the government approved a 1 billion-shekel plan for the development of the region. Israel’s Cabinet approved Dec. 26 a 1 billion-shekel ($317 million) plan for encouraging demographic and economic growth in the Golan Heights. Aiming at doubling the Israeli …

Offers of money by the Islamic State to join its ranks prove “irresistible” to those hit hard by Syria’s collapsed economy. A man being led by security guards shuffles into an interrogation cell in a military prison in the Kurdish-administered city of Hasakah in northeastern Syria. His hands are cuffed, …

A Yemeni rebel attack on Saudi Arabia’s southern border town of Jizan killed two people and wounded seven more late Friday, Saudi state-run media reported. Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched a projectile that killed a Saudi citizen and Yemeni resident in the southwestern Saudi province of Jizan, the official Saudi Press …

Turkey froze the assets of 770 Turkish nationals and a Chicago-based foundation, according to a decision published Friday in the country’s official gazette. The list of targets includes 454 people with alleged links to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in the United States. The Turkish government accuses Gulen and …

Americans performed three very different policies on the People’s Republic: From a total negation (and the Mao-time mutual annihilation assurances), to Nixon’s sudden cohabitation. Finally, a Copernican-turn: the US spotted no real ideological differences between them and the post-Deng China. This signalled a ‘new opening’: West imagined China’s coastal areas …

Moscow considers the threat of a new missile crisis as serious, the RIA news agency cited Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Monday amid a standoff between Russia and Western powers over Ukraine. Throughout the crisis, Russia has veered between harsh rhetoric, calls for dialogue and dire warnings, …

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a marathon news conference Thursday, blamed the West for tensions on the Ukraine border and fears of war, but stopped short of issuing any pronouncements likely to drive further escalation. One of his most prominent television appearances of the year, the annual conference, which lasted …

When the news broke on December 7 that the Syrian port of Latakia had been bombed, and that an Israeli military spokesperson had declined to comment, a natural first reaction was that this air strike was the latest of hundreds over the past few years, targeting Syrian government facilities in …

Although reluctantly, current central bank governors and respected economists have ramped up their warnings that inflation is here to stay. However, while it took officials a considerable period of time to admit the inflationary threat, despite the signs and warnings, they are failing to name its root causes. Inevitably, and …

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has lambasted the United Kingdom for a “meddlesome statement” issued by the Foreign Office on Iran’s defensive capabilities, stressing that Tehran acts within international laws and regulations and in accordance with the Islamic Republic’s defense needs. “The nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran is …