World News

The U.S. and Iraq took a big step closer to a showdown with Islamic State fighters Wednesday as the Pentagon announced that 615 more U.S. soldiers are heading to Iraq in anticipation of the battle to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Secretary of State John Kerry threatened on Wednesday to end all cooperation between the United States and Russia to stop Syria’s civil war, unless Russian and Syrian government attacks on Aleppo end. More than 250 people are believed to have been killed in the besieged city in the last week.

Syrian forces pounded rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Sunday, killing at least 85 people and wounding more than 300 others, an activist group reported. The bombardment destroyed residential centers, overwhelmed hospitals and angered diplomats meeting at the United Nations.

The third leg of the world’s intractable depression is yet to come. If trade economists at the United Nations are right, the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history.

Russia has announced it is sending its only aircraft carrier to waters off Syria’s coast, as diplomats met at the United Nations in an effort to revive Syria’s failing ceasefire.

Negotiations between Washington and Moscow on potential cooperation in the air war against the Islamic State terror group in Syria have come to a screeching halt with little hope of resuming, according to the U.S. command in charge of American operations in the country.

The U.S. military will have to shift surveillance aircraft from other regions and increase the number of intelligence analysts to coordinate attacks with Russia under the Syria cease-fire deal partly in order to target militants the U.S. has largely spared, senior officials say.

A blistering new report blasts the U.S. government’s pouring of billions of dollars into projects in Afghanistan with inadequate oversight that in many cases fueled corruption on unprecedented levels and ultimately undermined America’s mission there.

A dozen US warplanes destroyed nearly 50 targets at an “Islamic State” chemical weapons production plant in northern Iraq, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

The United States is offering a reward of $3 million for information about fugitive Tajik Colonel Gulmurod Halimov, who joined the Islamic State (IS) group last year.

The United States and Russia working in lockstep against the Islamic State group and al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria. A rejuvenated truce that will compel President Bashar Assad’s air and ground forces to pull back. New flows of badly needed humanitarian aid.

Iran may have received an additional $33.6 billion in secret cash and gold payments facilitated by the Obama administration between 2014 and 2016, according to testimony provided before Congress by an expert on last summer’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

A Russian fighter jet flew within 10 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft over the Black Sea, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The U.S. transferred a total of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran in order to settle a long-running dispute over a failed 1979 arms deal, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after a fast-attack craft from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf on Sunday, U.S. Defense Department officials said on Tuesday.

An Iranian Grand Ayatollah recently said that the Mahdi – the Shi’ite version of the messiah – will arrive in a “super-modern vessel like a spaceship” and that until that time there will be no “peace, security, or decency” on earth.

The United States and Russia struggled Monday to keep alive negotiations to end the bloodshed between US-backed rebels and Syria’s Russian-aligned regime. Even as top diplomats vowed to keep trying, President Barack Obama expressed skepticism that an unlikely alliance between rivals would yield the breakthrough needed to end the 5-year-old civil war.

Despite formidable opposition across the political spectrum, President Barack Obama is using his final months in office to fight for congressional approval of a 12-nation free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed “in secret” to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year’s landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.

The UN has awarded contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to people closely associated with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as part of an aid program that critics fear is increasingly at the whim of the government in Damascus, a Guardian investigation has found.