ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

BEIRUT: ISIS fighters killed 26 Syrian soldiers on Monday west of Palmyra, a monitoring group said, after days of advances by government forces backed by Syrian and Russian air cover. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the Syrian army would soon recapture Palmyra from ISIS, which has held the desert city for nearly a year. Palmyra has both symbolic and military value as the site of ancient Roman-era ruins – mostly destroyed by the ultra-hard line Islamist group – and because of its location on a highway linking mainly government-held western Syria to ISIS's eastern stronghold. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting took place about 4 kilometers (2 miles) west of Palmyra. It was not possible to independently verify the death toll. Syria's state news agency SANA said the army and allied forces, backed by the Syrian air force, carried out "concentrated operations" against ISIS around Palmyra and the ISIS-held town of a...

By Lawrence Davidson  What is the difference between a textbook publisher giving into pressure from Christian fundamentalists seeking to censor the teaching of evolution, and a publisher giving in to Zionists seeking to censor awareness of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine? Neither phenomenon is a matter of opinion or perspective. One act of censorship denies facts established by scientific research. The other denies the documented violation of international law (for instance, the Fourth Geneva Convention) and multiple UN resolutions. So the answer to the question just asked is – there is no difference. In early March 2016 executives at McGraw-Hill took the extreme step of withdrawing from the market a published text, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, and then proceeded to destroy all the remaining books held in inventory. (Did they burn them?) Global Politics, which had been on the market since 2012, was a text designed by its authors to “offer students a number of lense...