The US witnessed an unprecedented spike in anti-Semitism in 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, with vandalism and school incidents leading the list. Some of the incidents, however, were fake.

There were almost 2000 anti-Semitic incidents reported across the US in 2017, including physical assaults, bomb threats, vandalism, and attacks on Jewish institutions, according to a report released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Tuesday.

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2017 increased by 57 percent compared to 2016, the single largest increase on record and the second-highest number reported since ADL started keeping track in 1979, the organization said. Incidents of vandalism increased 86 percent from 2016, with 952 incidents recorded.

"These incidents came at a time when we saw a rising climate of incivility, the emboldening of hate groups and widening divisions in society," said ADL's CEO and National Director Jonathan A. Greenblatt.

What could be better to beat the drum for regime change than tying North Korean missiles to Syria and chemical weapons? Apparently, the New York Times did just that when it wrote about a leaked UN report.

The article, run by the respectable US newspaper on Tuesday, is based on a 200-page report by a group of eight experts who were tasked by the UN Security Council to monitor how sanctions against North Korea are implemented. The country was punished for developing nuclear weapons and rocket technology with serious restrictions on how it can trade with foreign nations and has been finding ways to circumvent those.

The NYT focused on two particular episodes mentioned in the report. One was the interception in January 2017 of two ships carrying acid-resistant tiles from North Korea to Syria, with three other such contracted shipments revealed via paper tracking, although whether or not they were actually made remains unclear. The UN experts said such tiles are "commonly used in the construction of chemical weapons factories."

Arrests of illegal immigrants skyrocketed during President Donald Trump's first year in office, according to new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In 2017, "Our brave (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers arrested more than 100,000 criminal aliens who have committed tens of thousands of crimes," Trump announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

The official numbers dropped the same day, revealing a marked increase over the final year of former President Barack Obama's administration. Authorities arrested 155,000 illegal immigrants in 2017, a 41 percent increase over the figure from the previous year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed, according to CNN.

As the Trump administration has eliminated the Obama-era policies that restricted deportation arrests to only those illegals who pose a threat to public safety, the agency has been able to cast a wider net and detain foreign individuals who have not been convicted of a crime other than illegal entry into the country.

On Edward Said, othering, and the depictions of Arabs in America

"Why do they have to show that? That-that-violence," I said to my mom hours later, burying my face in my pillow, unable to sleep, my little body convulsing with this strange grief.

In the packed dark of our local theater, eleven years old, I'd been reeling, gripping the armrests in terror as Raiders of the Lost Ark flashed across the huge screen. The swashbuckling Indiana Jones had somehow escaped a trap-filled temple in Peru with the golden idol in hand, but his local guide hadn't. The image of a wide-eyed brown-faced man with a spike piercing his forehead had seared itself in my mind, but now they were somehow in Cairo, and Indiana, having escaped a chase in the casbah, found himself face-to-face with a black-cloaked, scimitar-wielding Arab. Smiling, laughing even, the man flung and swung the comically large sword from hand-to-hand. World-weary, Indiana pulled out his pistol and blew him away. The crowd around me erupted in cheers. Was I supposed to laugh? Before I could react, we were off again, with our American hero, between local "savages" and Nazis, until in the fury of the opened ark, the bad guys' faces literally melted off. Walking out of the theater, I did everything I could to hold back sobs.

The Guardian article from February 6, 2018, titled "Biggest airstrikes in a year hit Syria after rebels shoot down Russian jet" claims that "Russian and Syrian jets have bombed up to 18 towns across north-west Syria, devastating civilian areas and forcing fresh waves of refugees to flee". According to the journalists Martin Chulov and Kareem Shahee, a series of devastating airstrikes have been carried out in the northwest of Idlib province. "Nine people were treated for symptoms of chlorine exposure after a bomb was dropped on the town of Saraqeb by a helicopter", they claim.

Inside Syria Media Center has tried to get to the bottom of the adequacy of this information and determine whether it is credible.

Fake No.1: Mission Impossible

According to The Guardian journalists, "as many as 150 airstrikes beginning on Sunday were recorded in 18 towns of Idlib province by Monday". Trying to imagine the number of attacks carried out without interruption for 12 hours we came to the conclusion that Idlib Governorate, in the view of The Guardian, has suffered a saturation bombing. In fact, if these figures were accurate at least eight aircraft would have flown mission and dropped about 60 bombs at every town - based on an average maximum loading of eight FAB-500 general purpose bombs per one Su-25 jet.

At the same time, Business Insider reports that "the most recent satellite images of the Russian-operated Hmeimim air base in Syria show Moscow has 10 types of aircraft in the war-torn country, 33 jets in total and a smaller number of fixed-wing aircraft." So, all the Russian aircraft are supposed to have taken off and landed 4 times, refueled, loaded weapons and once again set course for Idlib for the 12 hours.

If it really did happen, this military operation could be compared to the one-night air raid on London during WW2, which caused over, 500 deaths a night. But this has nothing in common with the casualties reported by The Guardian.

Facebook has not found any indications that Russia interfered in the UK's withdrawal from the European Union referendum.

Experts from the social media giant did not find any evidence of active advertising initiated by Russian accounts during the Brexit vote.

A letter from Simon Milner, Facebook's director of policy in the UK, to Conservative MP Damian Collins, who heads the parliamentary committee on digital culture, media and sport, said investigators failed to find a shred of evidence that Russia tried to influence the referendum.

A UK farming family has been left distraught after suffering the theft of 1 million bees - believed to be the biggest insect-related heist in history.

Brackley business Beekeeper Honey, run by the Manton family, found 40 of its hives had been stolen on Saturday. Each hive holds roughly 25,000 bees each, and they are believed to have been taken between February 17 and February 24.

Beekeeper Lara Manton was in charge of the stolen bees when the honey-making insects went missing. She said this time of year the Manton family carry out regular checks to ensure the hives are not damaged due to the adverse weather. It was during one of their routine checks that they discovered their hives had seemingly evaporated into thin air.

"They were in a field between Fringford and Bicester, which you can't see from the road. So it is weird, someone must have scouted them out or knew they were there. That's what worries us."

The US could be facing a security crisis and it has nothing to do with the Russians this time. According to a new study, the majority of military-age Americans don't meet the criteria for service - mostly due to health problems.

As many as 71 percent of young US citizens are ineligible to serve in the armed forces, research conducted by the Heritage Foundation in mid-February says. This state of affairs - which that the study describes as "alarming" - could soon lead to a serious shortage of recruits for the US military, which relies on a "constant flow of volunteers every year."

Out of 34 million people aged between 17 and 24, over 24 million are unable to join the armed forces, the paper says, warning that the US military will "inevitably suffer from a lack of manpower." It further adds that it is not a "distant problem" as the military is already experiencing problems with recruitment.

The US Army in particular is expected to have a hard time meeting its 2018 goal to enlist just 80,000 volunteers, the study says. "I would argue that the next existential threat we have... is the inability to man our military," Army Major General Malcolm Frost, the commander of the army's Initial Military Training Command, said during a panel discussion co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation back in October 2017.

A defense source tells Russian media that military engineers have advanced work on the next big anti-satellite weapon.

Russian defense companies have created a plane-mounted laser that can hit satellites - at least according to an anonymous source quoted by Russian news agency Interfax. On Saturday, an Interfax report cited the source as saying that weapons maker Almaz-Antey has "completed work on the anti-satellite complex," which includes the laser and associated ground control gear.

Independent and Western observers have not yet verified the claim. But the Russian program does exist. Last April, Almaz-Antey general designer Pavel Sozinov told Russian news agency Ria Novosti that Russian leadership had ordered the company to develop weapons that could interfere electronically with or achieve "direct functional destruction of those elements deployed in orbit."

One of the top roller-coaster sagas in what, some years ago, I christened Pipelineistan, has yielded a definitive twist.

The US$8 billion,1,814-kilometer Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI) was officially inaugurated on Friday, in full pomp, and with proceedings broadcast live on Afghan TV, on the Turkmen-Afghan border close to Herat.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani hosted Pakistan's Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and India's Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar.

Assuming there are no major glitches - and that's a major "if" - TAPI should, in theory, be finished by 2020. So far, though, endless deadlines have come and gone.