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Was the teleprompter malfunctioning? Or did the speech writer cut and paste too many times?

Fifty people have died in an attack at a market bazaar and a school near Kandahar airport that began late Tuesday, Afghan officials said.... .....The Taliban took responsibility for the attack. The assault occurred hours after a "Message to Obama" was posted to a video site, purportedly of Taliban suicide attackers warning that U.S. troops would not be safe in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have captured Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, taking government buildings and the city’s central prison in one of the biggest military victories for the movement since 2001. It is the most serious invasion of a provincial capital in 14 years.

The Taliban have seized the Bala Hisar fortress in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. The fighters achieved the victory, despite NATO airstrikes and government efforts. More than 40 people died and 330 were injured in the fighting, including civilians. Many others have fled from the provincial capital. This is the biggest coup for the Taliban since 2001, led by the group’s new leader Mullah Mansour. They have emptied safe deposit boxes at banks, seized weapons and vehicles, and released prisoners. It was also a public relations victory. Kunduz is one of Afghanistan’s richest cities. It is also a key...

Donald Trump is right: America's leaders are stupid. They're nothing but a bunch of losers. Well, at least when it comes to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's the only conclusion to be reached following two big developments this week. The first was President Barack Obama's announcement that the United States will decelerate its military drawdown from Afghanistan. Instead of preserving only a small force of about 1,000 troops, the new plan will station 9,800 in the country until 2016 and 5,500 into 2017. Their mission will be limited to training Afghan forces and supporting counterterrorism operations. This will help promote, in...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Right here in the New York Times, even today. Paul Krugman -- who hates everything conservative, hates everything Republican, and despises personally Ronald Reagan -- has a piece called, "Despair, American Style." "A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are 'down on America,' and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with...

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton caught the most unbelievable part of President Obama’s 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft. She calls him “delusional,” and there’s little room to argue with that assessment — you simply must see the video to believe it, but here’s the transcript: Steve Kroft: A year ago when we did this interview, there was some saber-rattling between the United States and Russia on the Ukrainian border. Now it’s also going on in Syria. You said a year ago that the United States– America leads. We’re the indispensable nation. Mr. Putin seems to be challenging that leadership. President Barack Obama:...

President Obama has decided not to directly confront Russia over its new air offensive in Syria, believing that President Vladi­mir Putin will soon find himself in a Syrian “quagmire,” but he has approved a new escalation of U.S. efforts against the Islamic State. Obama laid out the U.S. response to Russia’s actions during a meeting with senior aides Thursday evening. Details were firmed up in a meeting Friday morning among national security principals at the White House, senior administration officials said. At the same time, the president also approved proposals, made prior to this week’s Russian actions, to strengthen the...

Even now with the Russians on the verge of combat operations in Syria, the White House still says it believes that they’re there to fight ISIS. John Kerry says that his Russian counterpart told him that the Russians are “only interested in fighting” the Islamic State. Other administration officials hold out hope for a grand U.S.-Russia coalition against ISIS. But that’s nonsense: Vladimir Putin landed troops in order to protect his investment in Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. The White House should know better, because no matter what U.S. officials say about fighting the Islamic State, Obama’s underlying goal in Syria...

The Obama administration's policy toward Syria and its more than four-year civil war is rapidly becoming a black mark on the president's legacy. And a scathing new report by Peter Baker of The New York Times details the mind-boggling decision by the White House to refuse to accept any responsibility. The blame for the failed US effort to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS "should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place," administration officials told Baker. There are only "four or five" US-trained rebels left fighting...

Last night President Obama hosted a dinner of "foreign policy experts" to get advice about his ISIS plans. Among the guests were Sandy Berger, a man who got caught stealing federal documents; Strobe Talbott a man whose employer receives major funding from the terrorist-funding government of Qatar, and Zbigniew Brzezinski a man who was involved in creating both the Islamist state of Iran and the Taliban....Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Mr. Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Mr. Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage...

Moscow (dpa) - Russia on Thursday dismissed US concerns of a military buildup in Syria, saying that its servicemen have been in the country for many years to help with the military equipment that Moscow provides to the government. "There are Russian military servicemen in Syria. ... Their presence is connected with supplies of weapons for the Syrian army, which is bearing the main burden of combatting the terrorism of the Islamic State and other extremist groups," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, according to state news agency TASS. He told reporters that Russia sends planes carrying humanitarian aid and contract-based...

Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt argued that Syria may be “the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.” Hiatt contends that Obama managed to convince the American public that doing nothing was “the smart and moral policy.” The way Obama sees it, the United States causes more problems than it solves, and besides there wasn’t much we could do anyway by backing a bunch of rag-tag...

Yet, of the Americans who died last week in the suicide bombing at the CIA’s most sensitive outpost in Afghanistan, it is the seventh whose presence has raised the most urgent questions as the US scrambles to repair — and avenge — the damage done to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. According to a security official in Kabul with close ties to the CIA, when Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi carried out his deadly mission at Forward Operating Base Chapman, he managed to kill the agency’s deputy head of station for the whole of Afghanistan. The senior agent was waiting...

President Barack Obama sent a celebratory message to Muslims around the world on the White House Twitter account nearly two hours before his first tweet on the subject of four dead Marines killed by an Islamic gunman. “From my family to yours, Eid Mubarak!” —@POTUS to Muslims celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr,” the White House tweeted. This message was tweeted at 4:48 p.m. according to the White House Twitter feed.

<p>President Obama reportedly penned a secret letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month discussing their shared interest in fighting the Islamic State -- a development one congressional source told Fox News "f***s up everything."</p> <p>The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that, according to people briefed on the letter, Obama wrote to Khamenei in the middle of last month and stressed that any cooperation on dealing with the Islamic State, or ISIS, was tied to Iran striking a deal over its nuclear program. The U.S., Iran and other negotiators are facing a Nov. 24 deadline for such a deal.</p>

Obama to Restart Transfers From Guantanamo By JULIAN E. BARNES, EVAN PEREZ and ADAM ENTOUS WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is set to restart transfers of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. officials said, kick-starting a long-stalled drive to close the prison. In a speech Thursday, President Barack Obama will reassert his case that closing Guantanamo is crucial to U.S. counterterrorism goals. While he isn't planning to detail in the speech how to speed up transfers from the prison, officials said the president in coming weeks plans to lift the administration's prohibition on sending detainees to Yemen. The president in the speech...

WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration announced to the world that it was planning to pursue a new Asia/Pacific-oriented national security strategy. Since then, North Korea has countered with a strategy of its own. In December, Pyongyang successfully launched a multistage intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a warhead-sized payload to the U.S. mainland. On Feb. 12, the North Koreans tested an improved-design nuclear weapon. After the test, Pyongyang announced that despite tightened United Nations sanctions that theoretically went into force last month, its latest nuclear test bolstered its defenses against U.S. "hostility." In a lengthy broadcast on the...

Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday. The acknowledgement is the White House’s latest disclosure in a continual release of details concerning the extent to which White House officials knew of the IG’s findings that IRS officials engaged in the “inappropriate” targeting of conservative non-profits for heightened scrutiny. Previously, the White House said counsel Kathryn Ruemmler did not learn about the...

Then CIA-Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points the Obama administration used after the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, because he wanted to see more details revealed to the public, according to emails released Wednesday by the White House. Under pressure in the investigation that continues eight months after the attacks, the White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails and a single page of hand-written notes made by Petraeus' deputy, Mike Morell, after a meeting at the White House on Saturday, Sept. 15. On that page, Morell scratched out from the...