A quick timeline of the backstory: Late last month, international charity Oxfam split with "ambassador" Scarlett Johansson over her involvement with SodaStream, an Israeli company with a factory in the occupied West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim. SodaStream...
A senior European Union official today discussed the possibility of the EU causing the collapse of the Palestinian Authority if the current round of peace talks fail, with an eye toward pressing Israel to make some serious moves toward Palestinian statehood. The...
The Russian Space Forces, an actual real branch of the Russian military (with on-again, off-again independence historically) is not in very good shape if war breaks out with some other planet. "We are unfortunately not ready to fight extraterrestrial civilizations,"...
Justifying massive military expenditures and a program of universal conscription isn't easy in a time of peace, but the Swiss military has managed to keep it up even though they don't face any conceivable military threats, and indeed haven't faced any in decades. But...
Desperate to drum up some sort of evidence of the NSA's effectiveness in tracking down terrorists by collecting phone records from literally every single American, officials have tapped a relatively minor case of an immigrant cab driver arrested for sending money to...
White House denials are so often overt lies these days that when they say something at least plausible it's worth examining. Today, Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted the NSA "examine only a very small percentage" of the world's Internet traffic. Examine as in give...
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed underwear bombing on Christmas of 2009 has fueled the imagination of many a TSA agent. Not that the TSA really did anything to foil him, mind, the underbomber's explosive parcel managed to start a small fire that burned his genitals...
Getting to the top of a Congressional committee with foreign policy implications is reserved mostly for the lunatic hawks, and Congressmen who are reasonable are usually anonymous. But maybe a little less anonymous today, after 118 members of the House of...
Let's dissect a headline: Pentagon: Iran will soon have nuclear missiles capable of striking US Here's the true parts: 1. Iran is a country that exists 2. The Pentagon is a place that says lots of nonsensical things If we're realistic about examining the "threat" of...
Usually one needs a hypothetical to make a point this clearly and strongly. Egypt's Freedom and Justice Newspaper, the privately-owned newspaper of the nation's former ruling party, has found itself completely out of luck today when they found out that the printing...
