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U.S. officials consider removing Castro regime from terror listU.S. officials are considering removing Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, even as Cuban allies continue to launch military attacks and trade for weapons. As part of President Barack Obama’s announcement in December that he would normalize relations with Cuba, Obama instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to review Cuba’s terror designation and issue a report in six months. While reports indicate that the administration is leaning toward removing Cuba from the terror list, such an action would conflict with the Cuban regime’s support for Colombian militants, Iran, and...

EU member states have been readying themselves to enforce sanctions on Israel for Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria, diplomats revealed Tuesday—and will strike hours after the March 17 elections. Israeli officials in recent weeks met with Europe’s most important foreign ministries at the EU headquarters in Brussels, an Israeli official told Walla! News on condition of anonymity, and said that the planned measures in Europe will be focused on “the illegality of the settlements under international law”—without any distinction between “settlement blocs” generally agreed upon to remain in Israel and isolated communities. “The guiding principle is their deepening and emphasizing the...

U.N. gives mixed signals on Tehran cooperation as nuclear talks intensifySenate Democrats on Tuesday backed away from a bipartisan push for immediate new sanctions on Iran, bowing to President Obama’s call not to undercut international talks to get Tehran to curb its nuclear programs in the coming weeks. The shift, announced Tuesday by Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat and one of the party’s outspoken hawks on Iran, came amid a series of mixed signals from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency over the question of whether Tehran was honoring promises to put its suspect nuclear programs on hold as...

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea on Friday demanded the lifting of sanctions, imposed by South Korea after a 2010 attack on one of its naval vessels, as a condition for resuming dialogue.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on Friday warned the West against trying to topple President Vladimir Putin and said that Russians are ready to sacrifice their wealth in Putin's support. Russia has for the past year been sliding into recession amid a slump in its energy export prices as well as Western sanctions against Moscow's role in the conflict in Ukraine that has claimed more than 5,000 lives. Questions have been raised in Russia and abroad whether the price that ordinary Russians are having to pay for the annexation of Crimea...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem — January 22, 2015 … The Israeli espionage agency, Mossad, in a rare public statement says that they do support Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s and US Congress’s effort to enhance sanctions on Iran. Misinformation spread by the Obama White House earlier today, using Bloomberg News, had stated that the Mossad did not agree with Netanyahu’s stance on placing tougher sanctions against Iran. Israel has argued that Iran is using “peace talks” as an excuse to develop both nuclear weapons and a delivery system for the nuclear weapons to attack Israel, Europe and the US....

Call him President No. He doesn’t want to cut taxes. He will veto any attempt to overturn the mess of Obamacare. He is adamant about opposing anyone who wants to undoing his executive order on amnesty, or his sudden turnabout of U.S. policy on Cuba. He won’t say yes to the Keystone XL pipeline. And hell will freeze over before he utters the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” Now the White House is furious that Speaker John Boehner has issued a February 11th invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, this just hours after the president made it...

On January 14, Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, to cut back by 60% the natural gas delivered to Europe through Ukraine. His ostensible reason: Ukraine was illegally siphoning off gas for its own use—a charge Ukraine denies. Overall Europe depends on Russia for 30% of its gas supplies, and some 80% of Europe’s Russian natural gas comes via Ukraine. Putin’s order would leave six countries in eastern and southeastern Europe totally without gas.

Reuters) - Billionaire financier George Soros has urged the West to step up aid to Ukraine, outlining steps towards a $50 billion (33.22 billion pounds) financing package that he said should be viewed as a bulwark against an increasingly aggressive Russia.Writing in the New York Review of Books, Soros said Europe and the United States needed to balance sanctions imposed on Russia with large-scale assistance to near-bankrupt Ukraine, which risks defaulting on debt as a result of turmoil caused by pro-Russia separatist fighting.

In a display of resolve the Obama Administration announced new sanctions, a “proportional response”, directed against the government of North Korea in response to the North Korean dictatorship’s recent reported cyber-attack involving senior executives of the SONY Corporation. In a country where the citizens have been eating dirt for years because of the communist regime’s policies, such a response by Barack Obama will clearly have no impact on the North Korean dictatorship’s behavior. Aside from the bluster of their ‘official statements’, the rogue regime simply isn’t very concerned about U.S. sanctions. They will just find ways to skirt any additional...

Frankfurt (AFP) - Tougher sanctions may destabilise the situation further in Russia and plunge the country into chaos, German deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned in a newspaper interview on Sunday. "The goal was never to push Russia politically and economically into chaos," Gabriel told the Bild am Sonntag. "Whoever wants that will provoke a much more dangerous situation for all of us in Europe," he said, pointing out that Russia was a nuclear power. The aim of the sanctions imposed against Russia so far was to steer the country back to the negotiating table. "Those who want to destabilise Russia...

BEIJING — North Korea on Sunday denounced new economic sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in response to a cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment that U.S. officials have blamed on the regime. The country's official news agency quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying the new sanctions would only "harden its will and resolution to defend ... the dignity of the nation." The new penalties —which cut off access to the U.S. financial sector for 10 individuals and three government entities identified as key operatives engaged in hostile behavior, including the country's intelligence agency — add to sanctions imposed...

Hundreds of German companies active in Russia are suspending or will cancel projects due to international sanctions over Ukraine and the weakened rouble. Thirty-six percent of 200 firms polled in December by the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce expected to cancel projects due to the situation in Russia. And 58 percent said they had been hurt by the sanctions, which began in March after Moscow's annexation of Crimea and grew in response to Moscow's support for pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine. The biggest reverse shift so far for German business in Russia came last week when chemical giant BASF cancelled a...

January 02, 2015 FoxNews.comThe Obama administration on Friday imposed a wave of sanctions against members of the North Korean government, amounting to the U.S. government's first official response to the cyber-attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment. Despite lingering questions from private security analysts over whether North Korea was responsible for the hack -- as the FBI has alleged -- the White House described the new sanctions as retaliation against Pyongyang. "We take seriously North Korea's attack that aimed to create destructive financial effects on a U.S. company and to threaten artists and other individuals with the goal of restricting their right...

In his annual year end press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is in fact mentally unhinged. For three hours, by turns he demonstrated signs of schizophrenic paranoia, pathological dishonesty, deep seated passive-aggressive tendencies, woeful ignorance of world affairs and economics, and delusional confidence in Russia’s future prospects. Putin evokes the national self-image of the Russian bear. Putin’s bear is a natural hunter contentedly chasing pigs and boars, but otherwise minding his own business in his own sovereign forest. But somebody wants this bear to have a makeover, and to give up...

Now where have we previously heard Senator Rand Paul’s cliché-fest that constitutes his rebuttal to Senator Marco Rubio on Cuba sanctions? Well, from The Council on Foreign Relations to the New York Times and from Hillary Clinton to The Congressional Black Caucus—and that’s for starters. And oh, we also heard it repeatedly from every single one of the KGB-trained Cuban spies convicted by U.S. juries recently. “The embargo is Castro’s best friend,” Clinton chanted to an extremely friendly audience at the Council on Foreign Relations back in June while citing and promoting her book Hard Choices. The sanctions give “Castro...

Russia’s central bank on Wednesday launched another initiative to shore up the ruble, offering hard currency loans to help companies and banks service their debts. Stabilizing the ruble, which is one of the world’s worst-performing currencies this year following the slide in oil prices and the sanctions imposed on Russia for its involvement in Ukraine, is a priority for Russia’s monetary authorities. Russia’s largest lender, Sberbank, admitted again that it faced a run last week when the ruble was in freefall and individuals fretted over the value of their deposits. Its chairman, Alexander Torbakhov, conceded to Russian news agencies that...

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party may have run on a joint ticket with Likud in the last elections, but in a closed meeting on Tuesday he sharply attacked Prime Minister and Likud head Binyamin Netanyahu’s political management. According to Liberman, Netanyahu’s policy of placing supreme emphasis on maintaining the status quo is “failed,” reports Haaretz. […] In the meeting, which took place at Tel Aviv University, Liberman stated that Israel is not initiating any political processes and warned that without a peace agreement, Israel’s ties with the EU will be harmed and the Israeli economy will suffer serious...

Russian mid-sized lender Trust Bank is to receive up to 30 billion rubles ($530 million) from the central bank to stop it going bankrupt in the first bailout of its kind during the current rouble crisis. The central bank also said its Deposit Insurance Agency, responsible for managing crisis-hit lenders, would take over interim supervision of Trust Bank as of Monday. The measures "will make it possible for Trust to continue smooth payments operations. All the bank's clients, including depositors, can use its services as usual", the central bank said in a statement. Trust, which hired actor Bruce Willis as...

Now that Pope Francis has done his part to ensure that U.S. sanctions against the murderous regime in Cuba have been removed, the Holy See is already looking toward thawing relations with another brutal Communist regime: China. See here. Back in October, Matt Hadro, writing for the Catholic News Agency, explained that: "The state of religious freedom in China is moving from bad to worse, said U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), responding to a new report by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 'There’s a huge gulf now' between China and the Catholic Church, Smith stated during an Oct. 9 conference...