“Doing more of the same and expecting a different result would be the definition of lunacy”, Mansoor said.
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“We will not accept the idea that terrorist assaults on restaurants and theaters and hotels are the new normal – or that we are powerless to stop them”, Mr. Obama said at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “They told me that in two months, they would start training 2,400 and would give us weapons”. The president and world leaders are set to gather in Paris next week for long-scheduled climate talks.
US politicians have been urging the United States to pause its Syrian refugee program until the administration can confirm that it’s airtight against possible terrorist infiltration.
Obama said he had invited leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to the United States, insisting that good ties with Asian nations were “absolutely critical” to U.S. security.
“If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people”, Obama said, stating the tragically obvious.
Western leaders who had lectured him over Ukraine at last year’s G20 summit Brisbane, Australia, and sidelined him from the G8 group of industrialised powers, vied for private meetings with him at this year’s G20 in the Turkish resort of Antalya. USA backing for the Kurds puts the United States at odds both with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally Turkey, which is also an enemy of Assad in Syria and the Shiite-dominated U.S.-backed Iraqi government in Baghdad.
The U.S. State Department has issued a worldwide travel alert, citing “increased terrorist threats” from militant groups in various regions around the globe.
As President Obama’s administration prepares for the arrival of French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday, the criticism grows over his handling of ISIS and Syrian refugees.
The coalition has been bombing IS positions in Syria and Iraq for more than a year.
WASHINGTON-President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande meet Tuesday for the first time since the attacks in Paris, and at a critical moment in the U.S.-led military campaign against Islamic State.
On Morning Edition, NPR’s Scott Horsley explained that Hollande is trying to bridge a tough divide: the United States and Russian Federation have a fundamentally different view of the civil war in Syria. The violence has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced millions, leading to a migrant crisis in Europe and intense concerns in the USA about Obama’s plan to take in thousands of Syrian refugees.
While the USA military still controlled the country, radical Sunnis came together under the banner of al-Qaida in Iraq in a force arrayed against American forces, moderate Sunnis and the Shiites majority.
Separately, the USA military said it had destroyed 283 tanker trucks used by IS militants to transport oil from producing fields in eastern Syria to smuggling points, an acceleration of attacks aimed at crippling the group’s oil revenues.
The president has since softened his tone.
Cameron offered France new assistance Monday for its airstrikes against Islamic State insurgents in Syria and said he would ask the British parliament later in the week for approval to join the fight against the jihadists.
Putin’s instinct for exploiting perceived US and European weakness has been one of the features of his vigorous foreign policy as he has tried to reassert Russia’s great power status.
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“The American people are right to be concerned”, Obama said Sunday. Still, he said there’s a difference between vigilance and surrendering to fears “that lead us to abandon our values, to abandon how we live”. In fact, those who paid attention on Friday the 13th, may have noticed that there was also an attack in Beirut that ISIS has claimed responsibility for, piling on to two weeks of terror that began with the Russian airliner brought down in the Sanai peninsula.
