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The European Union’s (EU) foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said Tuesday's vote at the United Nations (UN) Security Council on Palestinian statehood underlined the need for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to urgently resume peace negotiations. The Security Council failed to adopt an Arab-backed resolution that would have paved the way to a Palestinian state, setting a 12-month deadline for Israel to reach a final peace deal with the PA and calling for a full Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria by the end of 2017. The vote "underlines once again the urgency of resuming meaningful negotiations between the...

The UN Security Council on Tuesday rejected a resolution on Palestinian statehood, with the Palestinians failing to get the minimum nine “yes” votes required for adoption by the 15-member council: Eight voted for the resolution and two voted against, with five abstentions. France, China and Russia were among the countries that supported the text setting a 12-month deadline for negotiations on a final peace deal with Israel and an imposed full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem by the end of 2017. Argentina, Chad, Chile, Jordan and Luxembourg also voted for the resolution. Australia and the United...

PA's unilateral resolution calling on Israel to "end the occupation" fails to receive the nine required votes to pass. Only eight countries voted in favor of the resolution, two voted against, and there were five abstentions. The resolution needed nine votes in favor to have passed. Australia and the United States voted against.

The draft resolution by the Palestinians calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem within three years and revised to include language declaring East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state was presented to the UN Security Council late Monday. The draft resolution affirms the urgent need to achieve “a just, lasting and comprehensive peaceful solution” to the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict within 12 months and sets a December 31, 2017 deadline for Israel’s occupation to end. Many of the changes to the draft are semantic, such as the addition of the word “just,” to...

Abbas ignored Kerry’s hints of sanctions and told him Jordan will present a resolution to the UN to force Israel to "Auschwitz borders.” Abbas, the one who is short in size and common sense, with Kerry, the one who is tall in size but short on common sense. Mahmoud Abbas is ignoring hints of American sanctions and a possible defeat in the U.N. Security Council which is set to consider a resolution from Jordan on Monday, ordering Israel to sign a peace treaty with the Palestinian Authority in one year. The resolution calls on Israel to surrender within three years...

Suffering a crisis of confidence over his leadership on Ebola a week before the midterm elections, President Barack Obama assembled a massive staff meeting on the issue at the White House Sunday.Including the president, there were 24 people in physical attendance at the meeting CBS News said was convened “to discuss a nationwide policy for health care workers returning from West Africa.” Vice President Joe Biden joined via telephone, and Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thomas Frieden and US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power joining via video teleconference.Sunday, the New York Times reported President...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

Pat Buchanan, the columnist, author, and until recently MSNBC's token right-winger, garnered a lot of sympathy when he was fired from his job at the left-leaning news network apparently because of a book he wrote. Too bad, as reported in the Daily Caller, Buchanan had to ruin things by articulating how obnoxious his views really are. In essence, he suggested that Israel with its 300 estimated nuclear weapons was a bigger threat to the United States than is Iran with its nuclear program on Russian television. Buchanan went on about how his favorite Jewish conspiracy, which he called the "neocons,"...

'No feasible way to provide for the safety of Israeli doctors and medical crews' The U.S. may be willing to send its finest, the soldiers in its military, to Liberia to fight Ebola, but not Israel. According to a report on Twitchy, America’s best ally in the Middle East for generations has refused to go along with a request from Samantha Power, America’s U.N. ambassador. The reports have pointedly noted that the U.S. cut off flights to Israel over the recent military activity on the part of Hamas, but has continued to provide flight connections to the Ebola-stricken West...

"But, may I add, the training also will service these troops in the same struggle that they've been in since the beginning of this conflict against the Assad regime"

Full title: Ambassador Power touts international support against Islamic State but won't name countries, commitmentsThe U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that the American-led effort to destroy the terror group Islamic State has support from more than 40 countries, but declined to name them or the extent of their support. “It’s up to the individual country,” Ambassador Samantha Power told ABC’s “This Week.” France last week joined the United States in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, and Saudi Arabia has offered to help train moderate anti-Islamic State group fighters. However, what remains unclear is whether Turkey...

Just one day after the horrific tragedy that left 298 people dead, Russia's Channel One ran a package telling its audience that the entire incident was orchestrated by the United States, specifically by the CIA. A document was broadcast purportedly showing that the U.S. was planning to do the same thing during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Viewers learned that the "U.S. orchestrated this because Ukrainian government is not sophisticated enough to orchestrate this," according to the broadcast, which was translated from the original Russian by CNBC. According to Channel One, Russia's swift economic growth has inspired the United States...

Who the hell does National Security Advisor Susan Rice think she is? Does she believe in freedom of speech? How else to explain her disdainful tweet: “Personal attacks in Israel directed at Sec Kerry totally unfounded and unacceptable.” Unacceptable? Is it only Israel that has no right to criticize him? Has Rice forgotten that Israel, like the United States, is a democracy that enshrines the freedom of speech? There has been a penchant of late by those in the Obama Administration to treat Israel like an errant schoolboy. When Israel Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said, according to media reports, that...

WASHINGTON — — When has a secretary of state been involved in so many disastrous, self-initiated negotiations? First, John Kerry convenes — against all advice and holding no cards — Geneva negotiations to resolve the Syria conflict and supposedly remove Bashar Assad from power. The talks collapse in acrimony and confusion. Kerry's response? A second Geneva conference that — surprise! — breaks up in acrimony and confusion. Then, even as Russian special forces are taking over Crimea, Kerry goes chasing after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — first to Paris, then Rome, then London — offering a diplomatic "off-ramp." Lavrov...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that Israel’s announcement of 700 new apartments for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem precipitated the bitter impasse in peace negotiations last week between Israel and the Palestinians. While Mr. Kerry said both sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, he noted that the publication of tenders for housing units came four days after a deadline passed for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and complicated Israel’s own deliberations over whether to extend the talks. “Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Mr. Kerry said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Still,...

Rather than make bold decisions conducive to peace, the government continues to “give the US the finger” with regard to talks with the Palestinians, Meretz MK Zahava Gal-on charged on Tuesday, reacting to statements by Secretary of State John Kerry that ascribed much of the blame for the present impasse to Israel. Kerry’s statements “are further proof that the extreme rightist… coalition has no interests in reaching an agreement, but rather is dragging out the negotiations and endangering Israel’s existential interests,” she said. “Instead of making courageous decisions, this bad government continued to give the US the finger,” she added....

John Kerry Defends His Diplomatic Efforts: ‘I May Fail – I Don’t Care’ By Ali Weinberg Apr 8, 2014 4:03pm Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry defiantly defended his diplomatic efforts, saying that while ambitious, they were better than doing nothing. While the purpose of Tuesday’s hearing was to pick through the State Department’s budget, it was Kerry’s record that came under scrutiny as his old colleagues on the committee accused him of taking on too many responsibilities with too few results. “I think you’re about to hit the trifecta,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,...

A State Department spokeswoman expressed surprise Thursday to hear that a purported “fatwa” by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prohibiting nuclear weapons, which President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry periodically cite, does not appear on a list of fatwas on Khamenei’s official website. “Oh, really?” Marie Harf said during a press briefing after a reporter brought this to her attention. “I will say, just in general, I’m not an expert on the fatwa process certainly, or on the supreme leader’s website,” she said. “But what I will say, and I think what people have said, is we...

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas did not announce his walkout from the negotiations with Israel or directly turn down the package of far-reaching Israeli concessions which US Secretary of State John Kerry assembled with Binyamin Netanyahu early Wednesday, April 1. He simply turned his back on the commitment he made ahead of the talks to refrain from unilateral applications to UN bodies while they were in progress. As soon as the US Secretary flew off to Brussels, he sent out applications for “the independent Palestinian state” to join 12 UN agencies as members. This was after the Palestinian leader upped his...

I've never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I'm beginning to see its uses. Diss: On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Hasan Rouhani named Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani is the Iranian president the West keeps insisting is a "moderate," mounting evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Aboutalebi was one of the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Here's the kicker: The State Department—the very institution whose diplomats were...