Beirut (AFP) - Kurdish fighters seized a strategic Islamic State stronghold in Syria Friday in a move that could impede jihadist movements near the border with Iraq, where they also control large swathes of territory.

Meanwhile, the United States and Turkey are to begin training and equipping moderate Syrian rebels for the fight against President Bashar al-Assad and IS.

The main Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) said its fighters had liberated Tal Hamis and surrounding communities at the request of residents "who wanted to get rid of these terrorists and mercenaries".

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "the jihadists retreated without much resistance after Kurdish forces, backed by Arab fighters, returned to Tal Hamis."

The Kurds now occupy a strip of land linking the Hasakeh provincial town, which has been under IS control for more than a year, with the Iraqi border.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said it was "one of the most important strongholds" of the group in the region.

The Kurdish advance comes after days of fighting in which YPG forces have taken some 103 villages and hamlets.

Since the clashes began last Saturday, at least 175 IS fighters have been killed by the Kurds and in air strikes by a US-led coalition.

Additionally, 30 fighters from the YPG and Arab units fighting alongside them have been killed. Among the dead was an Australian, the first Westerner to die in a Kurdish unit in Syria.

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People's Protection Units fighters celebrate in Syria's northeasten city of Qamishli on Febr …

The Pentagon said the coalition had carried out several air strikes in Hasakeh province on Thursday, including three near Tal Hamis.

The fighting came as Kurdish forces continued to battle IS after an offensive elsewhere in the province in which the jihadists kidnapped at least 220 Assyrian Christians.

- Mass exodus -

The offensive, during which IS also seized 10 villages, has prompted a mass exodus of an estimated 5,000 people to the cities of Qamishli and Hasakeh.

Jean Tolo, an official with the Assyrian Organisation for Relief and Development in Qamishli, said the pace of arrivals had slowed by Friday.

"We are offering the displaced food and everything they need," he told AFP by telephone.

"There are doctors working for free ready to deal with any emergency," he added.

Assyrians number about 30,000 among Syria's 1.2 million Christians and mostly live along the Khabur River in Hasakeh.

More than 210,00 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011.

Meanwhile, an official in Ankara said Turkey and the United States will begin preparing moderate Syrian rebels for combat.

Turkey, an outspoken critic of Assad, hopes they will battle the Damascus regime as well as insurgents from IS, whose territorial gains run right up to the Turkish border.

Washington hopes the first forces will be operational by the end of the year, with the goal to train more than 5,000 Syrians in the first year and a total of 15,000 over three years.

US intelligence chief James Clapper said Thursday that Turkey did not place a high priority on fighting IS and that foreign fighters had been able to travel through the country into Syria.

But Turkish officials insist they have done all they can to tighten border security.

Meanwhile, Britain and France said Assad cannot credibly be part of any future government combating the IS threat.

"We need a partner in Syria to work with against the extremists and this means a political settlement agreed between the Syrian parties leading to a unity government in Syria," British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius write in a joint editorial in Le Monde and Al-Hayat newspapers.

"It is clear to us that Assad could not credibly be part of any such administration."

At the same time that Hillary Clinton was pushing to make it easier for major corporations — including oil and gas companies — to do business abroad, many of those same companies were donating to the Clinton Foundation, which she administers with her family. At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state also donated a combined total of more than $26 million to the foundation, and played a role in philanthropic projects through the Clinton Global Initiative.

ExxonMobil and Chevron were among the donors to give to various Clinton groups and initiatives. So was Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, which is tasked with promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

From The Wall Street Journal:

As Mrs. Clinton prepares to embark on a race for the presidency, she has a web of connections to big corporations unique in American politics — ties forged both as secretary of state and by her family’s charitable interests. Those relationships are emerging as an issue for Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential campaign as income disparity and other populist themes gain early attention. …

In some cases, donations came after Mrs. Clinton took action that helped a company. In other cases, the donation came first. In some instances, donations came both before and after. All of the companies mentioned in this article said their charitable donations had nothing to do with their lobbying agendas with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Is this a big enough conflict of interest to concern environmentalists? Green groups disagree … or are silent on the topic. From Reuters:

“It’s hard to believe that [companies] don’t think they are getting something for their contributions,” said Ben Schreiber, head of climate and energy at Friends of the Earth, one of the largest environmental groups in the United States. …

Uncharacteristically, many green groups normally quick to attack politicians linked to oil and gas companies shied away from commenting on the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with these donors.

The Environmental Defense Action Fund had no comment because it does not have anyone with knowledge of the subject, a spokesman said. Another business-friendly green group, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, also declined, saying it would discuss the issues “when we have declared candidates.” The World Wildlife Fund had no comment.

While secretary of state, Clinton championed oil and gas development in Eastern Europe as a check on Russia — she even went so far as to fly to Bulgaria in an attempt to convince the government there to lift its moratorium on fracking. Meanwhile, many U.S. environmental groups have been pushing for domestic bans on fracking.

But at least some environmentalists understand that the issue has different implications abroad than it does at home. “Introducing fracking to produce natural gas in Eastern Europe was an element of national security — the less dependence those nations have on Russian gas, the better off they are,” Daniel Weiss, the League of Conservation Voters’ senior vice president for campaigns, told Reuters.

Another environmental litmus test for politicians — the litmus test of late — is the Keystone XL pipeline. But even as Barack Obama is shutting down Republican attempts to fast-track Keystone, Clinton is pointedly saying nothing at all. “You won’t get me to talk about Keystone because I have steadily made clear that I’m not going to express an opinion,” she said during a recent speech in Canada. “It is in our process and that’s where it belongs.” Her last statement on the topic came back in 2010, when, as secretary of state, she said she was “inclined” to approve the pipeline.

Yet on this, too, many activists are reluctant to take a hard-line stand. “Of course I wish she would say something, but I don’t go to bed at night worrying that Hillary Clinton isn’t talking about Keystone,” Bill McKibben — whose group 350.org helped make Keystone a key political issue — told National Journal. (McKibben also serves on Grist’s board of directors.)

Greens recently did get one encouraging sign from the presumptive candidate’s presumptive campaign. Former Obama top advisor John Podesta, who played a key role in hardening the administration’s stance on climate change and who staunchly opposes Keystone, has signed on to advise Clinton. So even if she doesn’t have an opinion on the pipeline at the moment, she’s got a powerful player on her team who certainly does.

Is Podesta’s influence enough to firm up Clinton’s wishy-washy record on dirty energy, and to counterbalance the coziness with the fossil fuel industry that six- and seven-figure donations might imply? That’s anyone’s guess, and one that environmental groups — at least at this early point — seem reluctant to make.

(Grist)

LONDON (Reuters) - British television broadcast the first picture of Mohammed Emwazi as a student on Friday, showing the man identified as the Islamic State "Jihadi John" killer with a moustache and goatee beard wearing a large baseball cap.

Sky News ✔ @SkyNews Follow Sky News can show the first known photo of Mohammed Emwazi (known as Jihadi John) as an adult http:// trib.al/8kjwNsy 4:42 PM - 27 Feb 2015 136 RETWEETS 36 FAVORITES

Sky News broadcast a photograph of the 26-year-old wearing a black cap with a logo that resembled the P from the Pittsburgh Pirates U.S. Major League Baseball team, which it said was stored by the University of Westminster where he studied.

British media had previously only published a picture of Kuwaiti-born Emwazi as a smiling schoolboy.

Two U.S. government sources have told Reuters that Emwazi is Jihadi John, the black-clad militant seen brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent in videos released by Islamic State (IS).

He appeared on the short videos in which hostages including Americans, Britons and Syrians were decapitated.

The document obtained by Sky News also showed that Emwazi had completed a degree in Information Systems with Business Management.

A spokeswoman for the University of Westminster said it was investigating how the information had been obtained and declined further comment.

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Paul Taylor)

Prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov shot dead near Kremlin

Last summer, the discovery of several new giant craters in Siberia drew worldwide interest, launching wild speculation that meteorites, or even aliens, caused the gaping crevasses. And now, scientists have found even more of them.

In July 2014, reindeer herders discovered a 260-feet-wide (80 meters) crater in northern Russia's Yamal Peninsula. Later that month, two more craters were discovered in the Tazovsky district and Taymyr Peninsula (also spelled Taimyr), respectively.

Now, satellite images have revealed at least four more craters, and at least one is surrounded by as many as 20 mini craters, The Siberian Times reported. [See Photos of Siberia's Mysterious Craters]

"We know now of seven craters in the Arctic area," Vasily Bogoyavlensky, a scientist at the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, told The Siberian Times. "Five are directly on the Yamal Peninsula, one in Yamal autonomous district, and one is on the north of the Krasnoyarsk region, near the Taimyr Peninsula."

Now, two of the craters have turned into lakes, satellite images reveal. A crater called B2, located 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) south of Bovanenkovo, a major gas field in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, is now a large lake ringed by more than 20 smaller water-filled craters.

But Bogoyavlensky thinks there may be many more. He called for further investigation of the craters, out of safety concerns for the region. "We must research this phenomenon urgently, to prevent possible disasters," he said.

Trapped gases

Although the origin of these craters remains somewhat mysterious, many scientists think they were created by explosions of high-pressure gas released from melting permafrost, or frozen soil, due to the warming of the climate.

"In my opinion, it definitely relates to warming and permafrost," said Vladimir Romanovsky,a geophysicist who studies permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Romanovskythinks he knows how this occurs: Pressurized gas — mostly methane, but possibly carbon dioxide as well — exists beneath the permafrost. Since warming temperatures thaw the permafrost from the bottom up, an underground cavity forms, Romanovsky said. As the gas gets close to the surface, it deforms the ground above, creating a small hill. Finally, the pressurized gas erupts through the surface, forming a crater, he said.

In November 2014, scientists went on an expedition to study the Yamal crater, snapping some stunning photos. Vladimir Pushkarev, director of the Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration, actually climbed down into the crater on a rope to observe it from the inside.

"You can see from the photographs a very different structure," where most of the hole is caved in, but only the upper 16 to 23 feet (5 to 7 m) looks like a crater, Romanovsky told Live Science. "Only the upper several meters [of ground] was thrown away, but most of the hole was actually there before the eruption."

Dangerous explosions

The erupting methane may have even caught fire. Residents near the crater in the town of Antipayuta reported seeing a bright flash in the distance, according to The Siberian Times.

"Probably the gas ignited," Bogoyavlensky told The Siberian Times. Investigating the craters will be dangerous, because scientists don't know when the gas emissions will occur, he added.

How the methane would have caught fire is somewhat of a mystery, Romanovsky said. "It seems like it happened during wintertime, so there should be no thunderstorms, no lightning," he said. He thinks the methane probably erupted without igniting, just due to high pressure.

These craters should only form when the temperature is warm enough to melt the permafrost. "If the warming continues, we will see more and more of this phenomenon," Romanovsky said. It could happen anywhere there are enough sources of natural gas, including parts of Alaska and northwestern Canada, he added.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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