Sunday of Week 1. A time when American football fans are used to being asked the question "how 'bout them Cowboys?" but this year those who tuned in were treated to a heavy dose of "how 'bout them multiple, open-ended military occupations?" For the first time since...
A Daily Telegraph exclusive, long on innuendo but positively spartan in details, starts with a leaked Christmas letter from British spy officials to former Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, in which they admit to releasing a Libyan dissident who they eventually...
A cable labeled 04HOCHIMINHCITY367 Sensitive and For Official Use Only describes the 2004 efforts by Microsoft to convince US officials of the importance of pressuring the Vietnamese government to switch entirely to Windows as an operating system. The cable, which was...
Over eight years, the US troops fighting in Iraq have faced massive local opposition, as well they might as an occupation force overseeing a war which killed a massive number of civilians. This would explain the surprise, then, when the New York Times led with the...
President Obama's tale of Osama bin Laden's death was very much a comic book style rambling narrative of fantasy and wonder, with many of the details retracted within hours of the telling. Another comic book version of the killing is coming out, though this time in...
When I was in high school physics, I had a problem of calculating how much the temperature of water raises by falling from the top of Niagara Falls to the bottom. My first answer was over 100 degrees C, meaning the water would boil. I knew this was obviously wrong,...
Its never really been clear to me why comic book storylines have such an ability to rile up political factions, but after the bizarre row over the French Muslim ally of Batman it should have come as no surprise when Action Comics #900 included a story about Superman,...
Ambassador Gene Cretz's estimate for a death toll in Libya today was 30,000 which, if I'm remembering correctly, is about as much as the US was willing to cop to for the entire Iraq War until the WikiLeaks documents showed that to be a deliberate (and dramatic)...
Speaking today in a speech to the Senate Gen. David Petraeus termed the largely fictional gains in Afghanistan "fragile and reversible" and cited al-Qaeda as a reason to continue the war. Though he may have remembered to change the nation to Afghanistan, there is...
In the wake of announcing 22 additional charges against him, Pfc. Bradley Manning's clothing was seized by the guards at the US Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, leaving him naked in his cell. The seizure of Manning's clothing was revealed by his lawyer, David E....
