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Syria has asked Washington to engage in military and intelligence collaboration to defeat their mutual enemy Isis, inviting US congressmen and senators to visit Damascus to discuss joint action against the jihadis who threaten both America and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

According to Robert Fisk, the Independent, it’s an offer that President Barack Obama will have to refuse – but not without some embarrassment. After deciding to bomb the forces of Isis, which calls itself Islamic State, in Syria as well as Iraq, Mr Obama was confronted by Vladimir Putin’s warning that any such unilateral action in Syria would be “an act of aggression”.

The US President will now have to explain yet again why he cannot collaborate against America’s “apocalyptic” enemies with a Syrian regime which he has also sworn to overthrow – even though this regime is fighting exactly the same enemies.

A former US ambassador to Ankara has accused Turkey of directly supporting al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities in Syria.

Francis Ricciardone, who was the US envoy to Ankara until late June, said that the Turkish authorities thought they could work with extremist groups operating inside Syria and at the same time push them to become more moderate.

According to press tv, this led Ankara to work with the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, as well as other militant groups, including Ahrar al-Sham.

Iran plans to start the construction of two new nuclear power plants in the southern province of Bushehr before the end of the current Persian calendar year (20 March 2015), the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says.

In a Monday interview, BehrouzKamalvandi pointed to AEOI’s consultations with head of Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation, Sergey Kirienko, and said, “We are close to reaching final agreements on the construction of two power plants with the capacity of at least 1,000 megawatts along with desalination equipment adjacent to the first Bushehr [nuclear] power plant.”