Syrian president 'has lost the right to be a leader,' Peres declares.

President Shimon Peres slammed Syrian President Bashar Assad during a reception Tuesday with foreign ambassadors in Israel in honor of Rosh Hashanah.

"Assad has lost the right to be a leader by killing a hundred thousand people. He caused it. He wasn't elected properly, it was never a real democracy but even in a democracy you don't have the right to kill your own people," Peres declared.

"Assad will disappear one way or the other," he added.

However, he continued, intervention may not be the right path. "War is a very serious business and I would suggest to every leader to think as much as they can before rather than afterwards," he said, adding, "I admire President Obama's attempt to examine every possibility to bring this horrible situation to an end."

Peres echoed other Israeli leaders in saying that Israel has no plans to intervene in Syria, but is prepared for any attack. An attack is unlikely, he added, explaining, "If Syria attacks us we will overcome them and that is why I believe it won't happen... We have one of the best security infrastructures and one of the best militaries in the modern world."

Military action against Syria not approved by the UN Security Council would be in violation of international law, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday, comments that came as US President Barack Obama pressed his case to Congressional leaders for a retaliatory strike on Syria over its alleged used of chemical weapons.

"As I have repeatedly said, the Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security," Ban told a news conference in New York prior to departing for the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, The Associated Press reported.

"The use of force is lawful only when in exercise of self-defense in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter and or when the Security Council approves such action," he added.

Information passed to US by Israeli Defence Forces' 8200 unit, former official tells magazine

A team of United Nations inspectors have resumed their second day of investigations at the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, as western leaders moved towards military action in response to the Syrian regime's reported use of chemical weapons against civilians.

The UN team left their Damascus hotel early on Wednesday after the operation was suspended on Tuesday following a sniper attack on its convoy on Monday.

The bulk of evidence proving the Assad regime's deployment of chemical weapons - which would provide legal grounds essential to justify any western military action - has been provided by Israeli military intelligence, the German magazine Focus has reported.

There is no obvious reason why the Western powers should care whether it was the friends or the family of Mohammed which took over the leadership of his movement upon his death. However there is plainly an agenda led by the USA to support the Sunnis in their spiralling regional conflict with the Shia.

This is not hard to rationalise. The ultra wealthy members of the Gulf regimes continue to act as the West's proxies in the region and provide harbour to its neo-imperialist armed forces, while at the same time maintaining themselves an obscurantist version of Islam which would have horrified Mohammed and breaks virtually every precept of the Koran, particularly as regards treatment of women and of minority religions within their territory.

In Bahrain the large Shia majority is brutally repressed with active western collusion; in Saudi Arabia the Shia minority in the East is degraded. Iran is the great Shia bogey, and the West is so determined to maintain it as "the enemy" that they refuse the most basic diplomatic openings. The UK turned down an invitation to be represented at the inauguration of a new more moderate President and hold initial conversations. Meanwhile, Shia groups have mustered the only effective military resistance to Israeli aggression, and in Syria a Shia friendly regime is under intense pressure from the West and its Gulf allies. Peculiarly, in Iraq Western invasion resulted in the installation of a Shia regime, but that was only one of the entirely unforeseen consequences of that most stupid of invasions, and the Western response is to try to split up the country and fuel multiple insurgencies.

"We have challenged the United States and France to come up with a single piece of proof, but they have been incapable of doing so."

"Anybody who contributes to the financial and military reinforcement of terrorists is the enemy of the Syrian people. If the policies of the French state are hostile to the Syrian people, the state will be their enemy."

"The Middle East is a powder keg and the fire is approaching."

"We shouldn't just talk about a Syrian response, but what will happen after the first strike. Everybody will lose control of the situation when the powder keg blows."

President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. Below is the full text:

The elected members of the U.S. Congress will soon vote on whether the country should send missiles into Syria, intervening in a war that has already claimed the lives of over 100,000.

One would think that the matter before the Congress would at least command their attention. But, as the Senate conducted a hearing today to discuss the details of the strike, and the arguments for and against it, Sen. John McCain took out his iPhone and played poker to pass the time.

An image of McCain's phone was captured by Washington Post photographer Melina Mara, and posted to the Post's live blog of the hearing. The photo is blurry, but clearly depicts a game in progress.

When he learned of the picture, McCain posted a flippant response to Twitter.

"Scandal!" he wrote. "Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!"

- John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) September 3, 2013

While he may have made up his mind on the strike (he said yesterday he is confident in the direction the White House is moving), McCain's game playing projected a certain lack of seriousness about a major strategic military decision. And, when some on Twitter saw his tweet, they lashed out in response:

"Haha, you're right!" wrote Digg's David Weiner. "It's absurd to expect someone who pushed us into two, now maybe three wars to give his full attention!"

"OUR LEADERS ARE SHAPING THE COURSE OF HISTORY," wrote Carlo Johnson of Brooklyn, New York.

"Yes, we shouldn't expect our Senators to pay attention for 3 whole hours. It's just bombing another country, after all!," added astronomer and author Phil Plait.

A new video has been posted on YouTube showing the extent of brutality exercised by the foreign-backed Takfiri militants operating inside Syria.

Warning: Graphic Content

The leader of Tokyo's bid for the 2020 Olympics has reassured the IOC that the Japanese capital is totally "safe" and "unaffected" by the leak of radioactive water from the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

On September 7, International Olympic Committee (IOC) members will gather in Buenos Aires, Argentina to choose between Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.

Ahead of the vote, Tsunekazu Takeda, the president of the Japanese Olympic Committee addressed the IOC with a letter, saying that "Life [in Tokyo], for all 35 million residents, is completely normal and safe and we do not foresee any change to that."

"The city's air and water are monitored daily and there remains no evidence at all of any issue, as confirmed by the Japanese government," the text reads, as cited by Associated Press.

This comes as Japan is striving to overcome the aftermath of the accident in the Fukushima nuclear plant caused by a deadly earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The disaster damaged cooling systems to the plant's reactors, as a result of which three of them melted down, leading to a contamination of air and sea.

On Tuesday, the Japanese government announced it is going to spend almost US$ 500 million to contain leaks of radioactive water from the nuclear station. Some $US 320,000 million will be spent on the construction of a massive underground frozen wall around damaged reactors to prevent the groundwater from mixing with water being used to cool the melted fuel rods.

Announced less than a week before the IOC's decision, the move is seen as the government's attempt to show that the nuclear crisis will not be a safety concern at the time of the Olympic Games.

Secretary of State John Kerry: "There is no doubt that Saddam al-Assad has crossed the red line. ... Sorry, did I just say 'Saddam'?"

A US drone has just taken a photo of Mullah Omar riding on a motorcycle through the streets of Damascus. 1

So what do we have as the United States refuses to rule out an attack on Syria and keeps five warships loaded with missiles in the eastern Mediterranean?

• Only 9 percent of Americans support a US military intervention in Syria. 2
• Only 11% of the British supported a UK military intervention; this increased to 25% after the announcement of the alleged chemical attack. 3
• British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a parliamentary vote August 29 endorsing military action against Syria 285-272
• 64% of the French people oppose an intervention by the French Army. 4 "Before acting we need proof," said a French government spokesperson. 5
• Former and current high-ranking US military officers question the use of military force as a punitive measure and suggest that the White House lacks a coherent strategy. "If the administration is ambivalent about the wisdom of defeating or crippling the Syrian leader, possibly setting the stage for Damascus to fall to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, they say, the military objective of strikes on Assad's military targets is at best ambiguous." 6
• President Obama has no United Nations approval for intervention. (In February a massive bombing attack in Damascus left 100 dead and 250 wounded; in all likelihood the work of Islamic terrorists. The United States blocked a Russian resolution condemning the attack from moving through the UN Security Council)