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US President Obama today applauded a deal reached on a United Nations resolution to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles, calling it a potentially huge victory for the international community. Obama hailed the resolution and disarmament plans as a "legally binding" and "verifiable" initiative which threatens consequences if Syria did not adhere to conditions. Under a deal reached yesterday, a proposed UN resolution would require Syria to give up its chemical weapons stockpiles and allow inspectors access to all sites. The proposal does not call for force, which would require a second resolution if Syria fails to comply.

NICOSIA — Iran has gained full control of its first nuclear energy reactor. Officials said the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization was granted full responsibility for the 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor at Bushehr. The officials said the transfer was completed in a ceremony on Sept. 23 attended by officials from Russia’s Rosatom, which oversaw the construction of Bushehr and pledged to provide fuel for the reactor for at least a decade. “But for another two years it will be under Russian guarantee and a number of Russian experts will remain in place to give advice and technical assistance,” IAEO director-general Ali...

The White House pool reporter says an unnamed official claims President Obama offered to have an "encounter" with his Iranian counterpart, but was turned down: Senior administration officials came to pool hold around 2:45pm to say that the White House had offered to have "an encounter" on the sidelines of UNGA with Iranian President Rouhani, but the Iranians informed the US today that it is "too complicated for Iranians to do at this point."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday accused the United States of blackmailing Russia over a tough UN resolution against Syria, and said the West is blinded by the idea of regime change in the war-torn country. "Our American partners are beginning to blackmail us: if Russia won't support a resolution under Chapter VII in the UN Security Council, then we will stop the work in the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," Lavrov said in a Channel One interview, according to Russian agencies. He said the OPCW is "about to make a decision" on Syria but the process is...

And in an opening speech devoted to Russian values, he castigated the West for losing touch with its Christian roots when it came to gender questions. Mr Putin said that "one-gender families" and exaggerated political correctness were leading countries into degradation and a deepening moral crisis. One Austrian professor challenged him on this and asked for a guarantee that minority values would be respected in Russia and not subject to harassment. Mr Putin denied there were any laws in Russia to punish sexual minorities for their orientation. The Russian law which had caused so much controversy was, he said, simply...

MOSCOW — First, Vladimir Putin accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of inciting protests against him at the end of 2011. The next fall, the Russian president threw the U.S. Agency for International Development out of his country. Then he decided civic groups that get U.S. financing must be foreign agents. By the end of last year, Putin decided Americans had become unfit to adopt Russian children. This summer he decided to harbor Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency document leaker, despite strenuous U.S. objections. And ever since the Syrian conflict began, Putin has thwarted President Obama’s attempts to get the United...

President Barack Obama said on Saturday he was willing to give a chance to diplomacy to help resolve the Syrian crisis, but warned the military option was still on the table. "Since this plan emerged only with a credible threat of US military action, we will maintain our military posture in the region to keep the pressure on the Assad regime," Obama said in his weekly address.

There was coverage of the prospect of this happening by the time Quotes of the day went up last night, but this morning it seems the news is official. A deal has been struck, and it’s pretty much everything Vladimir Putin was insisting on and nothing that the Obama administration wanted for insurance. ... I’ve been watching some talking heads on CNN this morning trying to spin this as some sort of a win-win, but that sounds like an awful lot of lipstick to try to paint on one rather sickly pig. On the plus side, if you weren’t interested...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted Iran’s invitation to visit Tehran to work out a strategy for the Islamic regime’s nuclear program, Fars News Agency reported Saturday. The West believes the Iranian program is a front for developing nuclear weapons. Putin, seen by Iran’s clerical establishment as a strong opponent to America and the West — especially after his successful political play on averting a U.S. missile strike on Syria — was approached by Iran to protect the Islamic regime in the face of continued pressure by the West over its illicit nuclear program. Russia and the U.S. reached agreement...

President Vladimir Putin loves to set traps for U.S. President Barack Obama. The only thing Putin loves even more is when Obama falls smack into one. Trap No. 1. Putin set his latest trap Monday with a seemingly attractive proposal to have international monitors identify and destroy Syrian President Bashar Assad's vast stockpile of chemical weapons. If Obama falls for this one, he and international monitors will be jumping through hoops for years The only question is why was Obama also smiling when he met Putin in St. Petersburg. Regardless of which trap Obama falls into, the last smile and...

After strike deal on Syria, Kerry says him calling it impossible was 'diplomacy' Published September 14, 2013 FoxNews.com Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday, after reaching a tentative agreement with Russia to disarm Syria of chemical weapons, that his earlier statement about the impossibility of such a plan was in fact “the language of diplomacy.” “I purposefully made the statements,” Kerry said in Geneva, Switzerland, after reaching the framework of an agreement with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “And I did indeed say it was impossible and [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] won't do it, even as I hoped it...

Syria’s President Bashar Assad on Thursday demanded that Israel ratify international treaties on non-proliferation of nonconventional weapons, and that the US promise not to attack his regime, as he set conditions for a negotiated resolution of the crisis over his chemical weapon. Assad said he would submit data on his country’s chemical weapons stockpile a month after signing an international convention banning the arms, adding that it was Russia, and not the US, that was making a negotiated solution possible. His comments were believed to mark Assad’s first formal acknowledgement that he has chemical weapons. Calling a month wait the...

There is a trick in the great labyrinthine bazaars of the Middle East: petty hucksters luring the vacationing franjis into the market maze and then getting paid to lead them out. As dusk looms, the unnerved outsider is always glad to be steered to familiar surroundings. In the matter of Syria, and America's staggeringly inept diplomacy, Vladimir Putin is the clever trickster who has seized upon an unsuspecting prey. The Russian strongman now proposes a way out for an American leader desperately searching for deliverance. For the full length of this relentless Syrian rebellion, the Russian autocracy aided and abetted...

It is the phrase of the moment, dropping from the lips of television reporters and radio commentators, salting the columns of pundits, earnestly being spoken by furrow-browed politicians of serious mien. The families of the fallen are entitled to war-weariness. So are those wounded in body or spirit, and their loved ones. The mother who has sent her son to war has a right to war-weariness, as does the father who prepares to send his daughter to battle again and again. But for the great mass of the American public, for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion,...

I … don’t remember this being part of the offer. Obama had better run it past Putin right away to see how he wants the U.S. to respond. Syria will fulfil an initiative to hand over its chemical weapons only when the United States stops threatening to strike Syria, RIA news agency quoted President Bashar al-Assad as saying in a television interview… “When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalized,” he was...

The swiftness with which attention is now being focused on collecting and destroying chemical weapons located in Syria has been truly breathtaking. Last Friday 6 September President Obama was waving a joint declaration signed by Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America at the G20 Summit in St Petersburg -- in which there was not one mention of the need to collect and destroy those chemical weapons. That same day President Obama in his press conference in St. Petersburg was dismissive of a similar proposal suggested...

Few people depress me these days like Michael Doran. A Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, Doran has been a leading advocate among thoughtful foreign policy analysts for a more aggressive U.S. intervention to end the conflict in Syria. Agree or disagree with that policy (I’m not sure I do, personally), it’s left him especially skeptical of the Obama administration’s push for limited strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons. When Russia seized on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s offhand suggestion that Syria could avoid U.S. strikes by giving up its chemical weapons, I reacted,...