Lebanon is a pressure cooker which could blow at any moment, but don't worry about confused US policy. Israel's threats to invade are not irking the Lebanese, but many wish Hezbollah would end a local Shiite-Christian spat.

America's confused position in Afrin, northern Syria, is not the only location in the Middle East where Washington's loyalties are at odds with the reality on the ground. Lebanon, a country once called the 'Switzerland of the Middle East' for its Western pretensions, is now what many call a failed state which is consumed by corruption. And a confused one, for Washington to grapple with.

Lebanon is one of the highest net recipients of US military aid and because of its unique location (bordering Israel) and its dominance by Iranian-backed Hezbollah, that makes it a special case in the eyes of Washington. Indeed, only recently when Israel threatened to attack, it was the US which "pledged" support for the Lebanese Army, which it erroneously believes acts as a "counterweight" to Hezbollah. Is the US misinformed and comically out of touch of the recent developments in Lebanon, or is it simply confused about the realities on the ground?

Campus Reform tested the partisan lines at New York's John Jay College by presenting elements of Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses as quotes from Donald Trump's latest speech.

Following Trump's first State of Union address this week, the conservative news outlet duped a number of students into believing that words uttered by Barack Obama - the more favourably-regarded president among young New Yorkers - were actually those of a Republican.

As the short video experiment shows, Trump's name can be controversial regardless of the content being shared. However, it also shows young Americans pondering the impact of their previous government's foreign-policy rhetoric.

On Barack Obama's stance on Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), which was to hunt and destroy them, one respondent said: "[The president] should mind his own business and focus on America because he is the president of the US, not of the whole world."

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales believes the Wikipedia model can help salvage journalistic integrity, but in the year since Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, the online encyclopedia has instead proven unable to even restrain its own biased editing community.

A look back on five of the biggest cases of political bias that gripped the site in 2017 should discourage anyone from looking to Wikipedia as a source for reliable and neutral information on the political topics of the day.

1. Instructor at Berkeley sending students on anti-Trump editing spree

UC Berkeley instructor Michel Gelobter launched a course in January 2017 for his students to edit Wikipedia advancing an "environmental justice" narrative. Gelobter's course description cited the importance of the course as being at "a unique moment in history...the first few months of a historically unique U.S. President whose agenda has been explicitly anti-environmental, sexist, and racist." He encouraged his students to "edit and/or create Wikipedia articles in order to create a neutral, well-documented record of the assaults on the environment and environmental justice expected to unfold early in the Trump Presidency."

Despite the clear bias of the course description, Helaine Blumenthal of the Wiki Education Foundation, which oversees such editing projects, posted it to Wikipedia without any alterations. After a few months, Wikipedia editors discussed the problems the course was creating and swiftly banned Gelobter from the site. While Wikipedia editors did delete some of the more egregious additions, others remained. In one of the worst examples, a lengthy section about "environmental injustices and the Trump Administration" consisting of over an eighth of the article on air pollution in the United States still remains essentially untouched, as do similar sections in the articles on food security and the Port Arthur Refinery in Texas. On Facebook, Gelobter insisted the pages were all neutral.

The Arabic-language website of RT reported that Caesar Kunikov (BDK-64), a Project 775 class large landing ship of the Russian Navy, has left the country for Syria's waters.

The Arabic RT quoted Turkish media as saying that the Caesar Kunikov ship passed the Black Sea's strait and entered the Mediterranean Sea on Friday.

The Russian sources had previously reported that the army's large cargo ship left Sevastopol port in Crimea for Mediterranean Sea to join the Russian naval fleet in Syria's Tartus port.

In August of 2011 President Barack Obama announced 'Assad must go'. Almost 7 years later, the Syrian leader is still holding strong. The fact that Assad is still in power is a testament to how much the balance of power has changed in the Middle East (and beyond) in the intervening years.

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East has primarily been the domain of Western powers. From the creation of new nations through French and British imperial mandates, through US-backed covert ops and military interventions from the mid-20th century to today, the Middle East has effectively been held in a state of arrested development for 100 years.

I believe however, that the Syria peace conference held in Sochi, Russia last week, marks a shift in the balance of power towards the region regaining control of its own fate.

Israel warplanes bombed a monitoring post belonging to the Palestinian resistance in the northern Gaza Strip in the early hours of today, no injuries casualties were reported.

The shelling targeted the site with two missiles in the area which lies northeast of Beit Lahia, causing material damage.

The area which was targeted had only recently been rebuilt following the devastation it suffered during Israel's 51-day war on Gaza in 2014.

According to the Palestinian news agency Wafa's report in July, three years after the war in 2014, only one third of the 11,000 homes destroyed have been rebuilt.

Many families continue to live in tents, according to a report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) on the situation for civilians in Gaza.

Though Facebook allowed Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip to mark themselves "safe" for the first time this week following a home gas cylinder which left seven dead and wounding 15 others yesterday, the feature was not enabled following Israel's attack on the enclave.

Facebook has long been accused of being complicit in Israel's occupation through its closure of Palestinian activists' accounts and those of organisations critical of Israel. According to Israel's "Cyber Unit", 69 per cent of its requests to remove content were agreed to by social media giants including Facebook and Twitter.

Many have also questioned the inequality of the social media platform which allowed Londoners to mark themselves "safe" following the terrorist attacks in the British capital last year, but has yet to enable the feature for residents of Syria, Libya, the Palestinian territories and other war-torn regions.

AN MP has called for a criminal investigation after a lion died at a safari park dubbed Britain's worst zoo.

Nero, four, was poisoned by barbiturates thought to have come from contaminated meat.

It happened last July at South Lakes Safari Zoo where 486 animals died in four years from January 2013, but the news has only just emerged.

The BBC was filming at the time in the park in Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria. New bosses had invited them in to show the zoo was improving.

A total of 177 Palestinians have been injured in a new wave of clashes with the Israeli servicemen in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, mostly due to the use of tear gas, local medical organizations told Sputnik.

According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society's figures, a total of 164 Palestinians were injured in the clashes that took place in the West Bank on Friday.

"Eight of them were injured by military bullets, 25 by rubber bullets, 131 were injured by gas," Palestine Red Crescent Society's spokeswoman Erab Fuqaha said.

Over 40 US organizations will rally to demand the release of Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl held in Israeli military detention since Israeli forces raided her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh early the morning of December 19, and more than 6,000 other Palestinians imprisoned by Israel on political charges.

"We must demand the release of Ahed Tamimi, who is held in Zionist captivity paid for by U.S. tax dollars that funded the soldiers who harassed and shot her family in the first place," said Nerdeen Kiswani of New York City Students for Justice in Palestine.

"The U.S. played a part in starting this, so we must play a part in ending it."

The demonstration is part of a series of worldwide actions marking both Ahed's 17th birthday on Wednesday, January 31 and the start of her Israeli military trial, scheduled to begin at Israel's Ofer prison the same day.

Being called to an area after a trespassing complaint, four Honolulu Police Department officers are accused of having forced a person to lick a urinal in a public restroom.

The four officers, who have between three and 16 years of service, have reportedly been stripped of their badges and guns, and are facing federal investigation.

"If true, these allegations violate the core values of the HPD," said Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard. "Our officers are sworn to uphold the rights of all persons. Personally, I am appalled at the behavior."

Ballard added that she contacted the FBI once the department learned about the incident, as the case involves abuse of power by multiple policemen.