The strike completed a policy reversal for President Donald Trump — who once warned America to stay out of the conflict — and drew angry responses from Damascus and its main ally, Russia. The missiles were launched from the USS Ross and the USS Porter in the Mediterranean Sea toward Shayrat Airfield. American officials believe it was used by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad to carry out a strike on Tuesday involving chemical weapons that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people.

"Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children," Trump said in remarks from Mar-a-Lago, his family compound in Palm Beach, Florida. "It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons." The president also called on other countries to end the bloodshed in Syria.

The strike provoked an angry response from Russia, which is backing the Assad regime in its six-year civil war against a patchwork of rebel factions and other groups, including ISIS.

While Israel and Egypt have enjoyed close cooperation under Al-Sisi, the Egyptian leader reportedly told Trump that peace between Israel and the Arabs should be based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

Israel at the time expressed appreciation for the concept of comprehensive peace (as opposed to separate peace processes with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world) but was unable to accept many of the terms, like opening the gates of the Jewish state to millions of so-called “Palestinian refugees.”

Should Egypt and other Arab nations convince Trump to adopt the 2002 Initiative as the foundation for future peace talks, Israel could once again find itself in a dangerous position. According to the Arab daily Al-Hayat, that’s precisely what’s happening.

American sources cited by the paper said Trump was looking at a US-hosted peace summit this summer, with Egypt joining the US as one of the chief arbiters between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Egypt is already officially at peace with Israel.

Hours after those remarks were reported, North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the waters off its east coast, according to South Korean officials. Trump will host Xi late this week at his Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, their first face-to-face talks since the November election.

The American president is expected to raise longstanding concerns about what the new administration angrily describes as an unfair bilateral trade relationship and about what is seen in the West Wing as Beijing’s stubborn refusal to do more to contain North Korea’s belligerent behavior.

“It is now urgent, because we feel that the clock is very, very quickly running out,” the official told reporters. “We would have loved to see North Korea join the community of nations. They’ve been given that opportunity over the course of different dialogues and offers over the course of four administrations, with some of our best diplomats and statesmen doing the best they could to bring about a resolution.”

When I wrote that a conflict with North Korea could be “Trump’s first war” last month, I was still hoping that cooler heads would prevail and that a military conflict could be avoided.  Unfortunately, it appears that a peaceful solution is not on the cards, and that means that the United States may soon start bombing North Korea. 

And of course if that happens the North Koreans will strike back with whatever they can, and that includes nuclear weapons. I don’t know if I have the words to effectively communicate how serious this situation could become.  We have gotten to the point where the White House is openly talking of going to war with a nuclear power…

And Donald Trump better get the public approval of South Korean and Japanese leadership before ever attempting such an attack, because they will likely pay the highest price if North Korea is able to strike back.

If South Korea or Japan balk at backing such an operation and then they get hit by North Korean nukes, the United States could lose them as friends and allies forever. The stakes are incredibly high, and there are so many things that could go wrong. So let us pray for peace, because the alternative is almost too horrible to imagine.

In other words, those procedures were being done to women against their will.  The United Nations Population Fund is the tip of the spear when it comes to implementing the UN’s twisted population control agenda, and so Donald Trump should be greatly congratulated for defunding them.

When Trump does something right, he should be applauded.  And defunding the United Nations Population Fund is one of the best things that he has done so far. Unfortunately, the US accounted for only about 7 percent of their funding, and so the sick and twisted work of the United Nations Population Fund will continue to go on around the world.

Public opinion in Hungary and Poland is also strongly against being forced to accept thousands of migrants from non-European cultures. Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – PiS) swept to victory in 2015, partly due to voter anger over the previous government agreeing to take migrants under the quota system.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been a vocal opponent of the scheme from its conception, asserting that forcing member countries to take a compulsory quota of migrants is unlawful and will “spread terrorism around Europe”.

Later this year, the two countries will be given an ultimatum and have to decide whether they are willing to maintain an anti-mass migration stances if it puts their membership of the EU at threat, a senior diplomatic source from one of the bloc’s six founding member states told The Times.

The source said: “They will have to make a choice: are they in the European system or not? You cannot blackmail the EU, unity has a price.”

NATO is not just the world’s most powerful and long-standing military alliance, which has successfully deterred the potential enemies of its members for seven decades. It is a guarantor of Germany’s national security and a precondition of its continued existence as a politically independent state in Europe. And nobody disputes that NATO’s backbone is the United States’ superior and vast military capacities. They protected Germany against Soviet aggression during the Cold War and have deterred revisionist Russia’s repeated demonstrations of force over the last decade.

And at the core of this deterrent are nuclear weapons, many of them stationed in Germany itself. That leaves Germany with a very serious debate ahead: whether to continue relying on a United States that is now committed to signaling its unreliability or to begin pursuing its own nuclear deterrent — either on its own or as part of a new European security structure.

Rudolph Herzog’s recent Foreign Policy article presented a simple view of this argument, where proponents of the idea, such as myself, were represented as adventurous cowboys blind to the lessons of history. But the debate is far more complicated, and more critical, than Herzog portrayed. This is a debate triggered not by indulgent fantasies but by the potential of a strategic vacuum at the heart of the continent.

Nuclear weapons are expensive, contentious, potentially contagious, and dangerous. Germany is in no rush to get them. But if the shelter of the US nuclear umbrella is removed while Russian weapons are still pointed at Berlin, it will have no choice.

Could the revived Arab plan, coupled with Trump's stated eagerness to strike a deal, signal an opening for restarting stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks? Here's a look ahead. What's on the table?

At their annual summit last week, Arab leaders renewed an offer they first made to Israel in 2002 — recognition by dozens of Arab and Muslim nations in exchange for allowing the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Israel has balked, among other things, at the envisioned scope of withdrawal from the lands it captured in 1967 and unsuccessfully sought to renegotiate the initial proposal.

With the summit declaration to back his case, Jordan's king will be able to tell Trump that Arab leaders are serious about achieving what Jordan's foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, described as the "historic reconciliation between Israel and the whole Arab world."

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to report on STRATCOM programs, Air Force General John E Hyten argued for fully funding the modernization of the US “nuclear triad” lest the American atomic arsenal fall behind the weapons developed by Russia, China and North Korea.

Senators appeared particularly interested in Russian nuclear capability, which Hyten described as “a primary element of their overall national security strategy.” “We have to meet strength with strength,” he told the committee, as one never wants to negotiate with potential adversary from a position of weakness. The US “has only effectively dealt with Russia from the position of strength,” Hyten said.

It’s no coincidence that my country, Germany, has also seen a resurgence of a once-common, but more recently discarded, term: “das Abendland.” In English it is usually translated as “the Occident,” but its literal translation is quite poetic: “the Evening Land.”

The far right uses it as a synonym for Western Europe and its values; the anti-immigrant movement that sprung up at the height of the refugee crisis, usually referred to by its acronym Pegida, is known in full as Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicization of the West”).

The Nazis, playing on those same sentiments in the 1920s and ’30s, appropriated “Abendland” for their own dark purposes. As much as the Nazis tried to refashion German society, they also positioned themselves as defenders of a pure Western European past: Hitler was the heir to Charlemagne, and the Nazis claimed to be the only ones able to defend the West against Jews and Soviet Communism.

It came as a former Tory leader suggested that Theresa May would go to war with Spain to defend the sovereignty of the peninsular just as Margaret Thatcher did with the Falklands. Lord Howard said the Prime Minister will stand by Gibraltar during Brexit talks amid claims of an EU “land grab” for the territory.

Rear-Admiral Parry said that he did not believe current tensions would lead to military conflict. However, he insisted that Britain's military capability "significantly" over-matches Spain's and that if it came to a war, the UK is - qualitatively - three times more powerful.  Our capacity to do them harm is far greater.

But he added: "We could cripple Spain in the medium term and I think the Americans would probably support us too. Spain should learn from history that it is never worth taking us on and that we could still singe the King of Spain’s beard”.

“Terrorists can not stand London multiculturalism”, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan said after the recent deadly terror attack at Westminster. The opposite is true: British multiculturalists are feeding Islamic fundamentalism. Above all, Londonistan, with its new 423 mosques, is built on the sad ruins of English Christianity.

The Hyatt United Church was bought by the Egyptian community to be converted to a mosque. St Peter’s Church has been converted into the Madina Mosque. The Brick Lane Mosque was built on a former Methodist church. Not only buildings are converted, but also people. The number of converts to Islam has doubled; often they embrace radical Islam, as with Khalid Masood, the terrorist who struck Westminster.

The Daily Mail published photographs of a church and a mosque a few meters from each other in the heart of London. At the Church of San Giorgio, designed to accommodate 1,230 worshipers, only 12 people gathered to celebrate Mass. At the Church of Santa Maria, there were 20.

The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted. “The biggest benefit I think is convenience,” said Patrick Mesterton, co-founder and CEO of Epicenter. As a demonstration, he unlocks a door by merely waving near it. “It basically replaces a lot of things you have, other communication devices, whether it be credit cards or keys.”

And as with most new technologies, it raises security and privacy issues. While biologically safe, the data generated by the chips can show how often an employee comes to work or what they buy. Unlike company swipe cards or smartphones, which can generate the same data, a person cannot easily separate themselves from the chip.

Ben Libberton, a microbiologist at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, says hackers could conceivably gain huge swathes of information from embedded microchips. The ethical dilemmas will become bigger the more sophisticated the microchips become.

“The data that you could possibly get from a chip that is embedded in your body is a lot different from the data that you can get from a smartphone,” he says. “Conceptually you could get data about your health, you could get data about your whereabouts, how often you’re working, how long you’re working, if you’re taking toilet breaks and things like that.” Libberton said that if such data is collected, the big question remains of what happens to it, who uses it, and for what purpose.